22 August 2001
Pairing: 2+R/ denotes thoughts
She's slippy
You're sliding down
She'll be there when you hit the ground
Relena turned to Duo with a wry little smile. "So."
"So."
"Are you feeling as set up as I am?"
"Yup." Looking up at her from the floor, Duo cocked his head to one side. "Do you mind?"
Relena only smiled. "Not really."
"Me neither." He grinned back, then clutched his stomach in melodramatic distress. "Well, except that I'm starving to death."
"Fortunately, we have a solution to that problem. Could you--?" He obediently swept the papers off the coffee table onto the couch, and she set one of the domed trays in front of him.
It was undoubtedly the best meal of his life, but afterwards Duo couldn't remember a single thing he'd eaten. All the mental space reserved for things like flavor recognition was being taken up by more important things, and Duo might as well have been eating reheated ramen for all the attention he was able to devote to his food. /Man, she's even graceful when she's just sitting there eating. And when she pushes her hair back like that, does she know how beautiful her ears are? Great, now I'm staring like a lovesick teenager--not too far off, I guess. But still.../
Fortunately, he was capable of multitasking, so they weren't left in wide-eyed silence. From anecdotes of the war and discussions of politics to shared laughter over favorite vids, the conversation tumbled happily forward until they were rambling together over much more intimate territory.
"Nobody ever gave you a nickname?"
"Relena is my nickname--most people call me Minister, or Your Highness. Or worse, if you can imagine...." Then she stopped, looking embarrassed.
"What? You remembered something, didn't you?"
A delicate flush spread over Relena's cheeks, and she shook her head vehemently.
"C'mon, what?"
"My mother--my second mother. She used to call me--oh, you're going to laugh!" Relena hid her eyes.
"I won't, I promise," Duo wheedled.
"Well, it's really nothing all that interesting. She called me 'little dove.' But her first language was Danish--a lot of people speak it in the Sank Kingdom, since we're so close to Scandinavia* --so it turned into 'lille due.'" She peeked up at him from the other side of the coffee table. "See? Now you're going to laugh."
"Lil' Du-ay. How do you spell that?" Duo nodded as she told him, committing it to memory. "Lille Due. That's adorable. And hey! We're only one letter apart! O for e, see?" Now he was definitely grinning.
Relena grimaced. "I knew you'd get entirely too much mileage out of that." She reached for her water glass, flashing him a laughing look over its rim. "So is your name a nickname? I always thought it was rather unusual."
"Sort of." He tensed, shoulders hunching almost imperceptibly.
"Churches," Relena said quietly.
Duo glanced up at her. "I can't believe you remembered that. But yeah--churches. One church."
She was just watching him, neither seizing on his words nor pushing the subject away--but something in those calm eyes opened a door that had been shut for a long time, and suddenly he couldn't stop talking.
Relena sat listening with her hands folded in her lap, at least at first. When Duo got to the last days of Maxwell Church, his hands curled into fists on the table; without hesitation, she reached out silently to cover one of them with her own cool fingers. She kept her eyes fastened on his face, absorbing everything. Only her thumb moved, stroking the side of his clenched fist in continuous reassurance. By the time his story had reached the years just before the war, Duo had captured her hand tightly in his--evidently without even realizing he had moved, since his gaze remained fixed on some pattern in the carpet.
Eventually the flow of words came to a gradual halt, ending in a shaky sigh of relief. Duo's grip relaxed at last, and he glanced down at the table. "Holy christ!" he yelped, staring in horror at her bloodless fingers. "God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you tell me I was mashing you to a pulp?" He began feverishly to rub the life back into the abused digits.
"It's all right, really." Relena flexed her fingers by way of demonstration. "See? No harm done."
Still staring at her hand--the slender fingers now an angry red, but clearly functional--Duo mumbled penitently, "I don't know where that came from. I don't usually dump all this on people."
"You didn't dump anything," she insisted. "_You're_ still carrying it, not me--listening is the easy part. And anyway, you must have needed to talk about it, if it insisted on coming out."
"I guess so." He looked up sheepishly. "Cheaper than therapy, huh?"
"Well, except that I can't give you any useful advice," Relena pointed out with a rueful smile. "All I can do is listen."
"That helps a lot. Really."
"You--" She chose her words carefully. "You have gotten to talk about it before, haven't you?"
"Oh, yeah--Hilde knows about some of that stuff, and so do the guys. Well, Quatre does, anyway. It wasn't a big deal, telling them--I mean, we were all freaks. But you--"
"Me?" Relena closed her eyes. "Remember when you asked me for my first memory?"
"Yeah?" Duo felt himself tense, as if for battle, and willed his muscles to relax.
"I wasn't quite truthful with you--but then, there are things one doesn't talk about at parties, I suppose." Her voice continued, almost dreamlike in its calmness. "When I was almost three years old, men came through my home with guns. They executed my father, and then hunted my mother through the house for almost an hour before they shot her, too; for years, I thought they had killed my brother as well." She opened her eyes again. "They certainly would have killed me, if one of my father's assistants hadn't found me in a kitchen cupboard and smuggled me out through the gardens."
He wanted very much to hurl himself back in time, to stand between that little girl and all the horror the wars had brought to her life. "And you remember that?"
"Not much of it. Just that I was frightened by the shouting--and that I was afraid to tell my mama I'd gotten blood all over my dress." She was still looking straight ahead, and her face was perfectly composed--but her fingers rubbed slowly against her skirt, trying to remove a stain that wasn't there. "For a long time I thought I must have dreamed it; nobody told me anything about the past until the wars began again."
He lifted a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. "Those were your real parents?"
"The Peacecrafts were my birth parents, yes. But the Darlians have truly been my father and mother. They risked their lives to keep me safe, after all."
Duo knew what happened next: Andreas Darlian had been blown to smithereens. His wife had collapsed from nervous exhaustion soon after, and was still hospitalized. That much was common knowledge, after all; but there was so much the historical record couldn't convey.
"I didn't know. I mean, I knew you were a princess--everybody knew that, it was all over the news. But I didn't know you were there, or that you remembered. And then, with your other dad, and--" He thumped one fist against his bent knee, frowning. "I fooled myself into thinking you were safe--that this stuff hadn't touched you. I guess I needed to believe that we kept you safe."
"The war got to everyone, one way or another. I wouldn't have been able to do the things I had to do, if I hadn't been in the middle of it all. On the edges of the middle, anyway." She slid him a self- deprecating smile, then grew quietly serious again. "And you kept a lot of people safe, Duo."
"It wouldn't have been worth a thing, if--" He didn't finish the sentence, but his eyes finished it for him. /--if anything had happened to you./
"You know that's not true." She took his hand in both of hers. "But thank you. For worrying, and for trying."
"Hey, as long as I didn't look like I was trying." Duo's attempt at a laugh didn't sound very convincing, even to himself, but it was probably better than starting to sniffle uncontrollably. Relena only smiled, then leaned forward to drop her head against his knee. After a moment of hesitation, Duo laid a cautious hand on her hair. They sat like that for a long time, listening to the fire crackle in the hushed room.
The phone rang, its shrill tones making both of them jump. Relena scrambled to her feet, grimacing at the pinpricks of returning circulation, and went to answer it. "Oh." She turned back to Duo, looking surprised. "It's my wake-up call. So it must be--"
He checked his watch. "Geez--it's three o'clock in the morning."
"I know," Relena said. "I'm supposed to be on a shuttle in an hour and a half. Augh."
"I guess I should go, then. Let you pack and stuff."
"I suppose so," she admitted, before continuing brightly, "Anyway, you need to get home and sleep! Will Hilde be worried?"
"Nah. She may not even be home yet."
They stood blinking at one another, still disoriented by the sudden breaching of their intimate cocoon. She reached out to touch his cheek. "I'm so glad you came."
"Me too." He'd never meant anything so sincerely in all his life.
"I wish I didn't have to go," she said, eyes lingering on his face.
"Yeah." Walking out that door was going to hurt--a lot. This already felt more like an amputation than a farewell.
"I'll write," Relena said, at the same moment that Duo burst out with "I'll call."
Then they laughed, some of the moment's awkwardness blessedly defused. Relieved to have a task, Relena dove for her briefcase and scribbled a series of addresses and contact numbers on the back of a diplomatic business card. "Those are in order--best chance of reaching me is on top, and that," pointing at a neatly-printed worldnet address, "is my email. That should work best of all, though I might not always be able to send replies very promptly."
"We'll figure something out." If Duo could have sold his soul--well, maybe just a limb or two--to make sure that came true, he definitely would have.
She took his hand, smiling. "Well. Be careful going home."
"You too." Not sure whether to kiss her hand or shake it, Duo stood there uncertainly for a moment before giving in to impulse and hugging her tightly. He expected some sort of startled gasp, or at least a little tension--but she just put both arms around his waist and held on, actually leaning her head against his chest for a moment before resuming a decorous distance.
He knew he must have gotten in an elevator, must have crossed the lobby--but without any consciousness of motion, Duo found himself blinking dazedly up at the building from the sidewalk. It was already early morning, but people still thronged the streets of this fashionable district, headed back to their swank hotels after a night at the clubs. They navigated around Duo with sympathetic disregard as he backed across the street to stare up at the lit windows, barely glancing at the moonstruck idiot in their path even when he actually started waving. If they had bothered, those passersby could have followed his line of sight up along the curlicued fa?ade of the hotel to where a slim, pale figure lifted a hand in answer from one of the highest windows.
A little bit before dawn, Hilde wandered into the kitchen to find the front door standing open; sitting just outside on the step, Duo was barely visible through the screen door. She rubbed her eyes, peering owlishly into the half-light outside. "Hey."
No response. Even in her semi-conscious state, Hilde began to worry. "Sweetie, did it go that badly?"
Duo turned, finally, and she was almost bowled over by the sheer illumination of his face. 'Happy' was an understatement--there were choirs of angels singing in those eyes, and a sun or two rising to light their way.
Hilde felt an answering smile creep over her own face. "Well, good. Just consider getting some sleep, huh? Juliet'll be sincerely ticked off if I let her Romeo keel over from exhaustion, and I don't think I want to be on her bad side."
He nodded, but didn't budge. "'M gonna stay out here for a little bit. Just till--"
And then Hilde figured it out: the 5 a.m. shuttle would be heading for the exterior launch bay in less than fifteen minutes. Wincing at the screen door's whine of protest, she edged out onto the step and settled down next to him. He patted her knee absently, watching the sky, and she scooted close enough to lean against his shoulder.
"I'm really, really glad, Duo. That she--that it was what you were hoping it might be. I mean, for all we knew she could have been a total loser off-camera. But she isn't, huh?"
"Nope. I think she might be crazy, though. Why else would she want--" He shook his head. "She's definitely crazy. And you know what? I don't care. If I just knew for sure how to do this without screwing it all up--"
Hilde yawned, opening her eyes in time to follow the silver arc of the shuttle as it moved from the take-off grid to the airlocks. "You'll figure it out. I have a very good feeling about this," she said sleepily.
Duo laughed, resting his cheek against the top of her head. "I'll take your intuitions over Vegas odds any day, Hilde. And you know what?"
"Hm?"
"You're the best fairy godmother ever."
End of Part 3: Ascension
* This is very much open to debate; there's a quick flash of a map in one episode that makes it look like Sank's actually closer to the Mediterranean. But Relena's official background info says she's northern European, which is why I decided to get wacky and go with a Danish connection here.
(:./lilias/mystified3)
