26-Jun-2001
Title: Fragmentary
Author: Dan
Archive: GWA
Timeline: Right after series. Zechs is dead. Treize is dead. And they _stay_ dead. The thing with the teddy bear didn't happen
Pairings: HxR/RxH
Warnings: Yuri, angsty-ish, issues with who's dominant ^_-
Disclaimers: Not mine. <snaps fingers> If it were, Cathy would have a Gundam.
I lie on the floor in a futile attempt to hide form the heat--the humidity--that presses against my skin like drying salt water. The fan's going with a steady whamp-whamp, but all it's doing is moving the hot air from one room to another. What a fucking rotten time for the air-cooling unit to blow.
I make a low, miserable sound, and roll over onto my stomach, cradling my head in my arms. I can't find a comfortable position. I push myself up into some yoga position with a name cooler than it deserves to look at Relena. She looks cool and comfortable as she sits on our big leather couch. I can't sit there. I can't stand the way the leather adheres itself to my bare skin like a clumsy lover's mouth. With her hair pulled into a high, cascading ponytail, and her long legs bare in ragged cut-off shorts, she looks young and fresh, like honeydew melon on a Sunday afternoon.
I watch, rapt, as she turns the pages of her book with careful deliberation. She looks so studious it's cute. She's reading _The Sun Also Rises_. She wants to relax so she reads Ernest-fucking-Hemingway. God must have a cruel sense of humor to put this one in my life.
She looks over at me, and the corners of her eyes crinkle. "Stop thinking about it."
"I can't," I reply, whiny and hating it. The heat makes me childish and cranky; the humidity makes me feel slightly sick.
"It's that German blood, can't handle the heat," she tells me, with more amusement than compassion lacing her polite tone. I drop back onto the floor, muttering something violent and miserable under my breath. She laughs, and it hangs in the air like laughter does in the old black-and-white movies. She has the same type of class that you see in those movies. That type of fineness that's impossible to describe.
I lie there listening to the slow whamp-whamp of the fan, wishing for the energy to do anything other than lie here feeling sorry for myself; something cool, but not painfully cold, touches the back of my neck. Relena slides the condensations slicked beer bottle into my hand. It's not German--I tease her about not being able to handle the real stuff--but it's a Corona, which is almost as good.
"Lime?" I ask.
"Only if you can get it back out of the bottle," she replies in a rather sly tone.
I just smirk at her. She drops a slice of lime into my palm and I roll over to sit up. Relena kneels elegantly beside me, careful not to spill. The beer tastes better than it should as it cools my mouth and throat.
"Now all we need is a soccer game to watch," she says.
"Duo's corrupted your vocabulary," I sneer at her with the disdain that only a true fan can achieve. "It's called football. That pansy-assed shit that they play in what used to be the States can't even be called a sport."
Relena puts up her hands in a gesture of defeat and appeasement. "Sorry, sorry."
"You should be," I sniff in mock haughtiness. We look at each other, and if we were normal girls, we would giggle. Since we are as fucked-up as we are, a small smile suffices.
"Whatever can I do to make it up to you?" she asks with insinuating sweetness. God, I wish she wouldn't say things like that and not mean it.
We sit in that companionable, but tense silence. All the things that I want to do hang between us like words better left unsaid. There's this untouchable quality to her that I want to shatter like glass, but damned if I know how to go about doing it. I prop one arm up on my knee and lightly hold my beer bottle by its neck with two fingers. Something odd drifts through air, the smell of potential and moisture. It's weird.
I turn my head, trying to pinpoint the source, but it seems to be omnipresent. The smell is like nothing I've ever smelt before. It's like the smell of a waterfall, but not quite. There's a type of thickness to the air that is not just the humidity. "What is that?"
"What is what?" Relena asks, honestly bemused.
"That smell, what is it?"
"Oh." She shrugs one slender shoulder rather dismissively. "It smells like rain."
I look at her like she's told me that she can see the future. The concept of rain is strange enough. Water from the sky--for a person from the colonies that's such an impossibility. Now she tells me that she can smell it; it seems like a minor miracle. "You can smell the weather?"
She looks a little surprised, and then smiles at me like I've done something cute. The smile makes me scowl. I hate the 'you're being cute' look. Duo gives it to me all the time. On the other hand, it's nice to see her actually engaged in something. I was beginning to despair of ever finding anything she was honestly interested in. It seems like all the interests she supposedly had before the war weren't really hers, just the ones she was supposed to have.
Relena leans back against the low table that takes up most of the floor space of our living/dining room area, and waves one hand lazily. "I never really thought about it. I guess it's something you learn after living with weather for a while."
I cock my head to the side at the sound of the first fat drop of water hitting the sliding glass doors. It's not unlike the sound of the shower spray when it hits the shower doors, but not really like that either. The sound is more individual, heavier. There's one, and then two, and then so many that the sound seems to roll through the room in an echoing crescendo of miniscule taps. Duo once had me listen to one of Heero's old cds of Taiko drumming that managed to approximate the sound. Heero had said that it was one of the hardest things to do with a Taiko drum, and then he had proceeded to give us a demonstration. He was exasperating like that.
I stand with a quickness that amazes even me, but I have to be outside all of a sudden. I feel the sharp, childish need to touch the miracle. Relena watches me with unreadable eyes as I throw open the doors to our tiny balcony and step out into what has become a downpour.
There's so much of it that it seems like a thin, shimmering veil has been thrown over the city. I hold my hands out in the rain, palms up, as if expecting someone to reach out and grab hold of them. The rain fills my hands, running over the lines of my palms like a blind fortuneteller. I tilt my head back into the rain and feel the drops on my eyelids, in my hair. I laugh, opening my mouth to the kiss of the rain.
The hiss of the glass doors closing catches my attention and I turn to see Relena leaning against them, her blue eyes dark and blank with thoughts I can only guess at. I watch, entranced, as she holds her hand out to the rain, catching it in her slightly cupped palm. She stares at the drops collecting there like they would answer any question she put to them.
"People are rather like raindrops, don't you think?" she says to me quietly. It's an odd philosophical question, the type she normally avoids asking or answering. I think she feels she's had enough of them to fill a lifetime.
"How so?" I ask, genuinely curious. It's rare that I get to see what she thinks, or why.
"One person all alone cannot do a thing; they merely fall through the world, shaped by the hardness around them," she cups both her hands to gather more of the pounding rain. "But one person moving with direction and confidence makes a trail that others follow, so one becomes many."
"And the many change things," I finish for her. Impulsively I brush my hand over her gleaming hair, now drenched as mine. "Ain't easy being the individual drop, is it?"
She shakes her head to deny my words. "I was never alone, not really."
"Oh, you were only that one lone voice in the wilderness crying out that we didn't need to be killing each other for peace," I reply, just a little snidely.
"I always had people who believed in me, in what I was doing," she replies, and I recognize her tone as a guilty one. So I've found something else she likes to use for self-flagellation. "Even in the beginning, there was Pargan and Noin."
"And you think everyone else was all by their little lonesome?" I ask incredulously. "Duo has the sweepers to fall back on, Trowa and Quatre found each other off the bat like the good little soul mates that they are. Before he had Trowa, Quatre had the Manguanacs."
"Heero? Wufei?" she asks, more for the sake of argument than anything else. She really loves picking fights; it's one of her little quirks.
"You, Sally," I reply with just as much terseness, and then I grin. "People with conviction draw others to them. You, the Gundam pilots, Treize, or Sally, it doesn't really matter. We need heroes right now, and you're one of them whether you like it or not."
She touches my drenched hair. "What does that make you?"
"A piss-poor groupie?"
That makes her laugh, but the emptiness I feel echoes in the sound. She sighs a little rueful before saying, "Ah, we're so stereotypical."
That makes me arch an eyebrow at her. "How, pray tell?"
"Two angsty teenagers standing out in the rain, talking about how hard they have it."
"Teenagers we are, angsty we just might be, but I didn't think we were really kvetching all that much." I tilt my head back into the rain and feel it move over my face like a lover's hands in the dark. "More like stating some facts."
"Ah, so instead we're laying bare the truths of the universe?"
That makes me snort, which means I inhale water. Not a very pleasant thing to do. Relena laughs while I cough, sputter and rub at my nose. I glare at her through my dripping bangs. The rain has long since turned my shirt and skirt into heavy, water-logged rags that cling to me and make me shiver. I sneeze.
Relena rubs my arms gently, and I wish she wouldn't. "Silly girl, standing out in the rain."
"Silly girl, following me out here," I whisper back.
Her eyes fill with an emotion that I don't really understand, but pray to whoever is listening that I might get the chance to figure it out. I watch her cautiously, completely aware that my breath has slowed almost to a complete stop, and my eyes have gotten very large. She leans into me, and tilts her head down a little to cover her lips with mine. We don't close our eyes, but watch each other warily, asking each other a million times with our gaze: 'Are you sure? Do you really want this? Me?'
I let myself melt against her gentleness. Her hands run over my back, warming me through the damp, thin shirt. I slide my hands under her shirt to cup her breasts, and she gasps a little at my cold fingers. I giggle unrepentantly as she breaks the kiss to glare at me. The rain beads on her skin, clinging to her bangs and eyelashes. She makes me think of taciturn forest elves--not the sweet kindly ones, but the ones who would just as easily kill as help. The ones with long, slender limbs, and eyes that hold more secrets than smiles.
I bring my hands up to cup her face, flicking the water away from her cheeks. She leans into me until she's pressing me against the railing of the balcony, her hands on my hips. We hold each other as if to mingle our body heat. Standing together in the rain, it feels like maybe we're being washed clean. I know it's an almost archetypal emotion, the idea of being purified by the rain, but it's a hard one to resist as I lean back against the steel railing with Relena holding onto me like I am the only stable thing in her world. Maybe I am. Now that's a frightening thought.
I carefully detach myself from her, sliding around in her arms until I'm leading her back inside by the hand. We drip all over the carpet, leaving a little line of water as I lead her towards the bathroom. She lets me pull off the sopping wet shirt as if it is too much effort to stop me. The clothing hits the tile floor with a sodden smack. Her skin is surprisingly pale under the fluorescent lights of the bathroom. My fingers are too cold to unbutton the clasp of her shorts. She gently moves my fingers away and does it herself. She lets the shorts slide off her hips and hit the floor with a resounding slap.
I want to touch so bad it makes my teeth hurt, but I'm not sure I can; so I hug my arms close to my body. Relena takes the gesture to mean that I'm cold, which couldn't be farther from the truth, and gently moves my arms to unbutton my shirt and pull it off as it clings to me. With careful fingers she undoes the clasp of my skirt and I obediently step out of it. She reaches around me for one of the heavy terrycloth towels that hang behind me. I let her start rubbing me dry, uncertain of what's going on.
"Relena?"
She stops in mid-gesture and looks at me with those blank eyes that hide all her secrets.
"What's going on?"
She's too smart to not understand what I mean; too serious to make a teasing comment the way Duo would. She watches me with an intelligence in her eyes that seems to add a tangibility to her gaze. I can see her considering everything with the same intensity that she used to give the problem of world peace.
"I don't know," she says finally, frowning. It's very unlike Relena to not know exactly what she is doing, which is one of the reasons that she's as lost as the rest of us in the post-war melodrama.
"What do you want with me?" Please, please let her say that she wants more than a comfortable roommate who won't ask questions. Please, please let her say that she wants more from me than that.
"I don't know," she says. She looks up at me with hesitation and a little bit of fear in her eyes. "What do you want with me?"
I understand that fear now. She's afraid of the same things that haunt my thoughts: afraid I don't really want her, afraid that I'll leave. I take a deep breath to make the little voices in my head be still, and then I kiss her. I open her mouth gently with my tongue, feeling her move to meet me. The towel slides from my shoulders as I step into the circle of her arms. I kiss her, and let her kiss me, until we're both dizzy. I break the kiss to come up for air, and to enjoy th sight of her all flushed with bruised lips and heavy eyes.
"I can get used to your tendency to demonstrate rather than explain," she says with a small grin.
"I'm not sure what to tell you," I say, because I know the words are important. "I can't tell you that I love you, because I don't know. But I can tell you that I want to figure this out. I can tell you that you fascinate me, and that I obsess over you probably more than I should. I can tell you that I want you, on so many levels."
I can see the thoughts spill across her face, and she doesn't try to hide them from me. That means more to me than I can explain. "I don't love you, but I might. I don't know. I don't know what's going on in my own head right now, so I can't tell you...."
I shrug. "I'm not your therapist. I don't need to hear you give long-winded explanations if you don't want to give them."
"Oh, so you just want to get into my panties, is that?" she teases.
"Well, get you out of them, actually," I reply.
Relena gives me that small Mona Lisa smile and strips. There is a God in heaven, Alleluia. It takes me less than half a second to strip off my underwear and bra. Relena laughs at my haste until I respond by kissing the life out of her. Her hands slide around my waist to clasp my back lightly.
"Bed," I mutter against her mouth. As much as I want her, my still-bruised body would really scream at me if we stayed in the bathroom with its hard tile floor.
She murmurs an agreement and almost drags me along behind her to her room. I'm just as eager to get there as she is, but her legs are longer than mine--not that I'm complaining about the length of her legs, no indeedy.
We tumble onto the low futon, and I don't think I've ever been quite so grateful for padding. Relena leans over me, on hand already moving to spread my legs. I arch up to capture her lips with mine, our tongues starting that little sparring match again. Relena brushes that sensitive spot in my body that makes my mind turn into a lovely mush. I moan against her mouth, hands roaming over her body: fingers tugging at her nipples, kneading the muscles of her leg, tormenting her clit. She makes a small growling noise in her throat: I am not being a good little submissive.
I hook one leg behind hers and shift my body weight, rolling her underneath me. She blinks at me in surprise and I kiss her nose. "Leverage."
"Sneaky," she says, but it ends in a moan as I slip two fingers inside her. I drag my teeth across one nipple, and she shudders. Her fingers move through my hair, pulling me back up to kiss her hard and fast, our tongues mimicking the speed and ruthlessness of my fingers.
She tries to pull the same trick that I just used, but I'm expecting it. Instead of rolling me underneath her, we end up tangled together on the futon. Her hands and mouth make me moan, low and thready. Our lovemaking is as much a contest of wills for dominance as anything else; not that I'm complaining, mind you. I find that spot in her body that makes her eyes flutter shut and her breathing pick up, and exploit it ruthlessly. Her own fingers move inside me with enough skill that I'm hard-pressed to keep my mind on the task at hand. Somehow, I manage.
Relena reaches that shuddering peak a half-second before I do, but I don't have much time to gloat before the rush of pleasure breaks over me and drags my mind away from any and all rational thought. We lay tangled together on her black-and-white futon with the light from the living room shining in on us. I let her cradle me in her arms, head resting on her breast.
"Only problem with this, is how do we know who's dominant?"
"It's a problem?"
She gives me a little look, and I grin. She growls again, and then sighs in pleasure. "I'm too fuzzy to show you that you are most definitely the submissive in this relationship. I'll do it later."
I snort, and nip at one nipple that's in range. "Submissive, my ass."
She just looks at me. "If we were guys."
I roll my eyes and kiss her cheek gently. "It'll be a case-by case basis thing."
I take her silence as an agreement, and let her snuggle against me. She stretches like a big cat before settling back to cuddle me again. Relena Darlian is a cuddler. It's cute beyond words.
End Part 3
(:./dan/fragment3)
