December 3, 2001
Blaze of Glory
A Duo songfic
Lyrics by Jon Bon Jovi
Interpretation by Truth
Rating - PG-13 for language and depressing subject matter.
Part 1 of 2
Yet another in my increasingly lengthy Justice arc. These are leaning away from being songfics. Miracle, the next one, owes nothing to Bon Jovi but the title and a minor burst of inspiration.
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing and it's characters do not belong to me and neither does this song. Bon Jovi also does not belong to me.
Warnings: This is my second attempt at writing the relationship of Duo and Hilde. Please be warned, I am NOT in favor of romantically linking these two characters and will again be trying to explore the relationship that I _do_ think they would have.
Personally, I think Duo would do much better with Sally or Wufei.... IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR DUO AND HILDE ROMANCE, DO _NOT_ READ FURTHER! Any emotional trauma experienced by continuing onward is NOT my fault, you have been WARNED.
Notes: This conversation takes place somewhere just after Endless Waltz. Song lyrics are denoted thusly >. And I _do_ like the idea of Hilde and Duo being friends and comrades. I just don't think....
Oh, just read the blasted fic.
"Duo!"
The former Gundam pilot grinned and pushed himself out from under the huge engine he had been tinkering with. "I'm over here!"
Hilde rounded a corner, waving a print-out in one hand. "Why do you _insist_ on working on stuff out here when there's a perfectly good workshop at the other end of the lot? I can _never_ find you when I need you!"
Duo grinned again at the look of completely feigned indignation on Hilde's face and wiped one arm across his forehead. "I like to work outside. It gives me a feeling of freedom, I guess. Not that an office drone like you could possibly _ever_ hope to understand that."
The look Hilde gave him promised some sort of evil retribution in the very near future. He tried to look appropriately terrified and failed miserably. Giving it up as a bad job, he decided to be serious. "What have you got there?"
"It's a note from Heero." She scowled. "I can't make heads or tails of it."
"What else is new? That boy's first language is cryptic." Duo held out one stained hand and Hilde gave him the note. He quickly scanned the three terse sentence and frowned.
"What does he want?" Hilde asked, practically bouncing with impatience.
"I'm not sure." Duo's frown became a scowl. "But he'll be here tomorrow. I'd better go clean up my apartment."
Hilde's eyebrows shot upward. "You're going to actually _clean_ that pit? Will wonders never cease?"
"You deliberately came over the morning after that party just so you could laugh at my hangover," Duo accused. "It's not my fault the place was trashed. I cleaned it up the next day, you know."
"Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure you did." It was Hilde's turn to grin. "Could you use a hand? I'm pretty good with a shovel."
"Ha. Ha."
Hilde had almost never been in Duo's apartment. He didn't spend much time there himself, choosing instead to either work or play in the district around their salvage and repair operation. He really only used the place as somewhere to sleep.
The few times Hilde _had_ been inside, there hadn't been much of a chance to look around. They had usually been there just long enough for Duo to grab whatever-it-was that he needed and then leave again.
His apartment was small and sparsely furnished. It consisted of three main rooms, a bathroom and a kitchenette. The room directly off the kitchenette had a couch, a chair and a television. One of the other rooms was Duo's bedroom and the third was a cross between a computer room and a guest bedroom, although to her knowledge this would be the first time that Duo had entertained an overnight guest.
Duo disappeared into the kitchen, muttering about dishes and leftovers. Hilde heaved a sigh and began straightening the 'living room'. There wasn't much to do. Despite Duo's lamentable tendency to simply leave his laundry piled on one of the chairs, it was fairly clean. There were one or two photos to dust and some vacuuming to be done and that was it.
She picked up the laundry and took it into the pseudo-guest room, which is where Duo kept most of his clothes. With a sigh, she placed the neatly folded clothing in the proper drawers. Duo's apartment was usually fairly tidy. His office was also fairly tidy, but that might be because he used it so seldom. He much preferred grubbing about with the various machines and leaving the paperwork to her.
The apartment reminded her strongly of his office, and after a moment she realized why. Both places were extremely impersonal. Neither of them had any real ornamentation, any indication that they belonged to anyone in particular.
When Hilde emerged from the guest room, Duo was still making splashing noises in the kitchen. She was going to leave the bathroom for him to do, and that left just one more room to tidy. She had never been in his bedroom. There'd never been any reason. Hilde paused before the door, placing one hand on the knob. She and Duo were co-workers and best friends. He wouldn't have accepted her help for cleaning if he had anything to hide from her.
She knew that she was rationalizing, but gave in to temptation anyway. She pushed open the door and walked inside. Unlike the rest of the apartment, which had white, gauzy half-curtains to let in the maximum amount of light, the bedroom was completely curtained and very dark. Too dark to see properly. Hilde fumbled at the wall beside the door until she found a switch. She flipped it upward and the room was flooded with gentle illumination.
I wake up in the morning
And I raise my weary head
The room's darkness was immediately explained. There were heavy black curtains hanging over the windows. The white walls had been repainted in a pleasant overlapping pattern of dark greens and blues, adding to the warm, enclosed feeling of the room. The switch she had touched lighted not only several large globes suspended from the ceiling, but three or four small lamps and wall sconces around the room. Again, unlike the rest of the apartment, this room looked as though someone had put a great deal of time and thought into it.
At one end of the long room there stood a large bed with its head pushed up against the wall. It was unmade and the coverlet, decorated with the same gently circular pattern of blues and greens as the walls, was pushed carelessly to one side. Hanging directly opposite the foot of the bed was a painting.
Hilde had seen the picture before countless times. You could find it at any poster or print shop throughout the New Republic. It was a piece that Relena had commissioned for public distribution and it featured all five of the pilots with their Gundams, gently illuminated by the setting sun. It was a marvelous picture, and heaven only knew where Relena had managed to get enough photos to enable the artist to paint it. The likenesses were uncanny.
Drawing closer, Hilde's jaw dropped. She had never seen the original, but she knew that she was looking at it now. The marvelous play of light over the bold colors of the sunset had never looked half so rich in the reproductions that she had seen.
Come to think of it, in the reproductions, the faces of the pilots had been slightly blurred, as if to prevent recognition. How had Duo managed to get his hands on the original? How had he managed to _pay_ for it?
She stepped forward, gently drawing her fingers across the brass plate that identified the painting. "''Victory,'" she read aloud. Certainly the gleaming figures of the Gundams and their proud pilots deserved such a title.
She stepped further into the room and closed the door behind her. This room was neat in a way that merely served to underscore the casual dust covering the rest of the apartment. The furnishings here were also sparse, but of much better quality; the huge bed, a chair by the window, a small bookcase, a desk in one corner and a large dresser. That was it. There were no clothes lying around and not so much as a paper loose on the desk.
This room couldn't _possibly_ belong to Duo. Where were the technical drawings and the cans of soda and the casually scrawled notes? Giving in to curiosity, she began to explore. There were other pictures on the walls and some interesting knickknacks on the desk. She wanted to look at them all.
I've got an old coat for a pillow
And the earth was last night's bed
Hilde examined the pictures hanging above the head of the bed. They were various pencil sketches for the most part. The most prominent images consisted of six or seven children caught in various attitudes of laughter, pouting or play. There were sketches of adults and teens as well, but the children stood out especially vividly, frozen forever at a particular moment of memory.
The attention to detail was amazing and she marveled at it as she examined each sketch. There was a particularly beautiful Asian girl in one corner, for example. She looked down her nose at Hilde with mild scorn. Her hair was pulled back and held in place with an ornament fashioned of peach blossoms.
Hilde frowned as a thought struck her. Surely she knew who had painted that famous quintuple portrait? If she did, she couldn't remember. The pencil sketches were done in the same style, and she knew that the faces of the playing children, at least, had once belonged to real people.
Some of the other sketches prodded her memory, and she realized that they must be people that she knew. She stopped before a vivid drawing of a weasel-faced man in the uniform of the old Alliance.
"Septum?"
Why would Duo have a drawing of _him_ of all people? A little further on was a kindly looking older man that she identified as Noventa. These sketches were more stilted, almost posed. The artist had not really known these people, she decided. Some of the subjects were portrayed very vividly while others lacked the spark of animation, almost as if the portrayal had been culled from existing pictures.
The last likeness on that wall was a charcoal sketch of a wavy-haired man with a wicked smile and rather distinctive eyebrows. The face was almost painfully familiar, although she had never seen that expression of mischief in any of the official portraits. She stared at it for a long moment, shivering a little as a thought struck her.
_All_ of these people were dead....
Duo never talked about his life before he had become a Gundam pilot. Truthfully, he didn't talk much about his life during the war, either. But he would occasionally tell her something that he and the others had done or a funny story about Heero or Quatre. But she had thought that she knew him.
Perhaps she didn't.
I don't know where I'm going
Only God knows where I've been
As Hilde stared at the last sketch, light suddenly flooded the room. She had been thinking so hard that she had not heard Duo enter and had not even realized he was there until he had tugged open the heavy curtains. She spun guiltily to face him, but he just smiled at her.
"You need more light if you're going to look at them properly," he told her.
"I, I...."
He shrugged. "It's all right. I just never thought to show you around before." He turned to lean against the desk. "Go on. You really should look at them more closely."
"Who did these?" she asked, unable to think of anything else to say. He indicated the large painting, thus confirming her earlier guess. "Same guy. He did pretty well with the painting so I thought it couldn't hurt to see how he'd do with some of these. Not bad, really, especially considering how many of the subjects were total strangers."
Still feeling like a small child who had been caught with one arm in the cookie jar right up to the elbow, Hilde obeyed. She looked carefully at every single sketch, some thirty in all. When she was finished, she turned to face him.
I'm a devil on the run
A six gun lover
A candle in the wind
"Who are all these people? I mean, I recognize...some of them, but why are they here?"
Duo frowned thoughtfully. He slouched further back against the desk and stared at the ceiling for a moment or two. "It's sort of a memorial, I guess."
It was Hilde's turn to frown. "A memorial?"
"Life is precious," Duo told her, his face solemn. "Every single person has the right at least to live. No matter how painful or wretched the circumstances, you can always choose to live, rather than just exist."
Hilde blinked, unable to figure out just where he was going with this.
Duo gestured expansively at the sketches. "These people only live in memory, now. I guess it's just my way of keeping them from being forgotten altogether." He paused, staring thoughtfully at a sketch of a smiling little girl. His voice was soft as he continued. "They remind me that a war has no winners. Only survivors."
Hilde wasn't sure what to say. 'That's really, really morbid,' was the only thing she could think of and she just _knew_ that would not be a good idea.
When you're brought into this world
They say you're born in sin
He turned, catching the look on her face, and smiled wryly. "Morbid, right?"
"I, uh...."
"It's all right. Everyone deals with these things a little differently. I like to think that they know I remember them. That's what peace is all about, you know. Time to remember and reflect."
He smiled at the picture of the little girl.
"Where did you get that painting?" Hilde asked, deciding that a change of subject was in order. Duo glanced dismissively over at the beautiful sunset hung on the east wall.
"That? The artist thought it would be most appropriately kept by one of the subjects and no one else wanted it."
"They didn't _want_ it?" Hilde was dumbfounded. "Why _not_?"
"Not everyone wants to be reminded of the war, Hilde," Duo told her gently. He gestured to the sketches again. "Most people would love nothing more than to never think of those years again. I think that cheapens those who fought and those who died but that's just my opinion."
Hilde again had nothing to say. This was grim stuff, especially coming from the most cheerful guy she knew...or thought she knew.
"You have to understand, none of us really wanted to do this. In fact, I know for a fact that Heero and Trowa still have nightmares about it." Duo straightened and moved away from the desk to stare out the window. "No one wants to remember the war. And that's why peace never lasts. I remember the war because someone has to."
"'Peace never lasts,'" Hilde echoed dumbly. "How can you believe that?"
Duo turned to face her and the look in his eyes was very old. "I've been a faceless victim, Hilde. I've seen what hunger and poverty and a lack of hope will do to people. I've lived it. But humanity, for the most part, wants to live in a soft, fuzzy cloud where nothing bad exists. This leads to pain, injustice and oppression as those who have ignore or abuse those who have not and that leads to violence, which leads to war."
"That's terrible...."
"Yes. I fought so that the war would stop, so that things would get better. I wanted there to be no more victims." Duo sighed. "That is, unfortunately, a pipe dream of the highest order."
Well at least they gave me something
I didn't have to steal or have to win
In the silence which followed, Hilde returned to staring at the sketches without really seeing them. She had no idea that Duo was holding so much inside all this time.... This _did_ explain one or two things, however.
Duo didn't have much truck with money, Hilde knew that. He'd rather trade things, or loan things or borrow them. She was the one who kept the books. She'd had to. Duo liked having money, but showed a magnificent lack of concern about accumulating more than he would actually use in any given month. Anything left over, he tended to spend or give away.
She knew that he had been a thief, but she had always thought that it was something that he had learned as a terrorist. She looked again at the sketches, suddenly noticing the threadbare clothing on the children and drawing some quick conclusions.
Duo held money in contempt because he didn't really need it. He'd never had any of his own before just recently and he had lived without it for a very long time, apparently. Well, money of his _own_ anyway. She had heard once from Wufei that he was certainly very free with other people's money.
"Duo, what _did_ you do during the war?"
Well they tell me that I'm wanted
Yeah, I'm a wanted man
Duo stared at the back of Hilde's head. That was a question that he had always been very careful _not_ to answer whenever anyone asked. Hilde had never asked him that before. He felt that perhaps she ought to know. It would be a relief to talk about it a little, and perhaps she could handle it. Not everyone could.
"Aside from piloting a Gundam, you mean?"
"Aside from that."
He weighed his answer carefully and several minutes passed before he spoke again. "I did a lot of hiding. I traveled a lot. I stole things. I killed a some people, blew some stuff up, engaged in a little computer piracy. You know, espionage thingummies. Mostly I just did what I was told."
"Why?" Hilde was concentrating now on the picture of the unknown Asian girl.
I'm a colt in your stable
I'm what Cain was to Abel
Mister catch me if you can
"Because I am the best." The statement was cold and flat.
Hilde shivered. She had heard him use that voice before only once. She had almost convinced herself that she had dreamed the whole thing. She had seen Shinigami just that one time, and once had been more than enough. She braced herself and turned around.
He was still standing in the window, but his posture was no longer relaxed. The rays of the late afternoon sun were bright enough to hide his features from her, even though his back was to the light. She discovered that she didn't really want to see his face.
"That's not really a very good reason, Duo."
He relaxed slightly at her tone, despite the fact that the lightness was obviously forced. "It was all the reason I needed at the time. You don't understand what it was like, Hilde. I spent my entire life being powerless, stealing in order to live, hiding and avoiding anyone bigger and stronger than I was. When they finally gave me an opportunity to fight back, I seized it and milked it for all it was worth."
She shivered a little. His voice was thawing a little, but this was still not the Duo she knew. "So it was about revenge."
"No. It was about finally having a chance to stand up for myself. It was about finally being able to make a difference. I had power and I had freedom. I could choose what I wanted to do. No one argues with a Gundam. No one sane, at any rate."
He laughed softly and Hilde began to relax. That last line was more like _her_ Duo.
"Tell me about your Gundam," she suggested.
"There is nothing in this world more addictive or more glorious than the kind of power a Gundam can give you," he said softly. "Deathscythe was power of a kind that I can't even begin to describe. I _lived_ for that machine.... And it lived for me."
She had heard stories about Duo's relationship with his Gundam. She hadn't really believed them until now. Possession warred with a note of worship in his voice. He moved away from the window and pulled something out of one of the cabinets on his desk. He casually tossed the black object at her.
Hilde lunged to catch it, only to have it suddenly snap out miniature wings and soar away from her to perch on the back of the chair by the window. Duo burst into laughter at her indignant expression.
"What _is_ that thing?" she demanded.
"Go on, have a closer look," he told her. His eyes sparkled as she slowly closed in on the tiny thing.
The toy which stood on the back of the chair was only about eight inches tall. It had folded up its wings when it had landed and the miniature Deathscythe stared impassively at her as she sank to her knees and gaped at it.
"Duo...." she couldn't say anything more. The amount of work that he must have put into the tiny model was insane. Every detail was perfect. The tiny green eyes glowed as it turned its head to track her movements.
"Pick it up," he told her, smothering a grin.
Hilde obeyed, gingerly closing her fingers around the wings as she gathered it up. She almost dropped it a moment later as its full weight became apparent. "What the...."
He burst into delighted laughter. "It's real Gundanium. Don't worry about dropping it, you can't hurt it that easily."
"How did you manage _that_?!" Hilde turned the mini-Gundam upside down, only to have it swat at her fingers.
"Turn it right side up again," he told her. "It's got a few more tricks to show you."
She obediently placed it back on the chair. It backed away from her and pulled out a tiny staff. Suddenly, a wicked green light sprung from one end of the staff and it was holding a tiny scythe.
"That, that's not really...."
"A beam scythe? Yes, it is. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to miniaturize all the components," Duo held out his hands and Deathscythe flew over to land gently there. "I haven't managed to automate it to do more than fly when it's thrown. Everything else has to be done by remote." He turned one hand to show her the remote control he held.
"That thing is _impossible_," Hilde told him. "You can't make beam weapons that small!"
Duo simply smirked at her. "You can't make them work underwater either, I hear tell...." He turned off the power to the miniature Gundam and tucked it back into its cabinet. "I just couldn't give up my Deathscythe altogether. There were a few bits of mostly melted Gundanium left over from Wing's rather spectacular disintegration. I got Howard to work up the shell for me. The rest is something that I worked on during my off hours."
"With that level of skill, you could do _anything_, Duo Maxwell. _WHY_ are you working with salvage and reclamation?" Hilde put her hands on her hips and glared at her partner.
"Because I enjoy it," he told her. "I never thought I'd be able to do anything except destroy things. It makes me feel more alive to take things that are broken or dismantled and make them work again."
I'm going down in a blaze of glory
Take me now but now the truth
I'm going out in a blaze of glory
"You're a very complicated person," Hilde sighed.
Duo shrugged cheerfully. "It beats working!"
She had to resist a very strong urge to beat him senseless with one of the pillows from the bed.
"Very funny. I want to know who you really are, Duo. I've known you for a long time now, and I'm just discovering that you're still a stranger. Can't you tell me? Can't you open up to me just a little?"
Duo sat down at the desk and swivelled the chair to face his friend. "Look, it's not really easy to talk about. Humor is a defense mechanism. Would you prefer that I lurked about in the shadows in a suitably melodramatic fashion?"
"No. Thank you." She pouted truculently at him. "I just want to understand. Is that too much to ask?"
"No. But I'm not sure that I'm the best person to try to explain this to you, that's all. Quatre or Wufei might do a better job."
"I want to hear it from you." Hilde leaned back against the bed. "You're my best friend, Duo Maxwell. Humor me."
Duo leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for several minutes. Hilde waited, fingers twining themselves into the thick comforter that lay carelessly folded over itself, draping off the edge of the bed.
"Hilde, once upon a time I lost everything." His voice was abrupt, cutting harshly through the silence. "In one afternoon I lost everyone I cared about and the only home I'd ever known. I learned then that there was no such thing as fairness, or justice. The only thing that mattered in the world was strength."
Duo stretched and flung one leg over the arm of his chair. His head remained tilted back, examining the ceiling and the end of his braid almost brushed the floor. Hilde bit her lip. She wanted details, but knew that if she interrupted him now she might lose her chance to hear the rest of the story.
"I was a child and being stronger isn't an option when you're trapped in a world run by adults. I had to learn to be faster, sneakier - deadlier. I couldn't afford a single mistake of any kind. I had to be the best at everything I could, because my survival counted on it."
"That's ...." Hilde could have bitten her tongue.
Duo didn't remove his gaze from the ceiling. "Horrible? Hmm. Perhaps."
Hilde sank further back against the bed. Feeling her feet slip against the carpeting, she allowed herself to slide to a sitting position on the floor. She stared at Duo, hugging her knees to her chest.
"Everyone has a right to live, Hilde. That's something that I have always believed to the core of my being. And yet, almost everyone to have touched my life has died." He sighed heavily, rolling his neck against the arm of the chair, settling himself more securely in place. "I chose to be Shinigami, against everything that I had been taught about life and hope. I brought him forth and set him free deliberately."
Hilde hugged her knees more tightly.
"Not the discussion you bargained for?"
She jumped slightly. Duo had caught her movement out of the corner of his eye and had turned his head to stare at her directly. With the setting of the sun he had ceased being so disturbingly back lit and she could see the cold, assessing look in his eyes. She could almost feel his gaze peeling away her skin to see what lay underneath.
"No." She shivered slightly.
"Do you still want to hear this?"
Hilde sighed and pressed her chin against her knees. "Yes."
He raised an eyebrow, evincing mild surprise.
"I want to know all of it, Duo. I'm tired of thinking that I know you, only to be proved wrong. We've been working together for years. Don't I deserve to know who you are?"
He laughed softly. "All right."
There was another pause in the conversation as Duo returned to staring at the ceiling. "I killed a lot of people, Hilde. Murdered, really. You can't call it a fair fight, not Mobile Suits versus Gundams. It's not only that, either. I've shot people, knifed them; even killed them with my bare hands."
Hilde wondered, not for the first time, how close she had come to being one of those people. He spoke again, distracting her.
"I have no excuses for who or what I am. I have no real explanation for the whys or hows. I did what I thought needed to be done so that other children wouldn't become like me. I'm not a monster."
Another long pause followed. The silences would have seemed unnecessarily dramatic, but Hilde could almost feel the man across from her struggling to verbalize his thoughts.
"Not anymore."
Hilde knew that this was all that she would get from him on this subject. The last two words were almost unheard; whispered and forgotten. He had closed his eyes and relaxed, lying almost bonelessly in his chair.
Lord I never drew first
But I drew first blood
"So that's who." Hilde drew in a deep breath. "And part of the why, but not all of it. You know why I joined OZ, and why I left again. Why did you join the resistance?"
"Because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Hilde blinked. "What?"
"You expected some noble tale of standing strong against the oppressor; being noticed as a young hero and sought out to be a Gundam pilot?" He laughed again, humorlessly. "No. I got myself caught somewhere I shouldn't have been and one thing led to another, that's all. I'm grateful to G. If he hadn't caught me then, I would have gone on to get myself killed in a spectacularly futile fashion some where down the road."
"So you just did what you were told?"
"It's not as simple as that." He scowled at something unseen. "We turned against the plans made for the resistance, you know. All five of us. We struck out on our own, eventually, renegades against everyone. We were never supposed to take the battle to Earth. Not the way that we did, anyway."
"Why?"
"Some things are better left buried, Hilde. Leave it be." Duo stretched again, then returned to his cat-like sprawl, obviously comfortable in a position that would have tied the muscles of any normal person into knots.
Hilde's back hurt just looking at him.
"We all gave it up quite happily," he continued. "Even Heero. Our lives are our own now and we don't dance to anyone's tune."
"What about that Christmas...."
"No."
The harsh flatness of his voice cut her off like a switch.
"But...."
He turned his head to look at her again, and his body was no longer relaxed. "Some things are better left buried," he repeated.
"But the whole thing didn't make any sense!" she protested. She released her legs and pulled herself to her knees, staring across the room at him.
"It's over. What really happened doesn't matter." He fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. "Maybe if they'd gone public with the real Operation Meteor then Dekkim Barton wouldn't have gotten as far as he did. But they concealed the truth and after Barton's stupidity, we destroyed the records ourselves."
"What was 'the real Operation Meteor'?" Hilde asked. "I thought that the Gundams were Operation Meteor."
His voice dropped another few degrees in temperature. "It's not worth the possibility of starting another war between Earth and the colonies simply to satisfy your curiosity, Hilde. Drop it."
Swallowing an angry retort, Hilde stared at those cold, amethyst eyes. "Don't you trust anyone?"
I'm no one's son
Call me young gun
"Heero. Quatre. Trowa. Wufei."
It hurt that her name wasn't on that list. The hurt was intensified by the fact that Wufei was. She could feel a look of betrayal sweep across her face.
Shinigami disappeared again and Duo pulled himself upright. "Ah, don't be like that."
"Why not!? You trust Wufei, even after what he put you through, but you won't trust me!" Hilde pulled herself to her feet, feeling as though everything she had learned had served only to put a barrier between them. "Why did you bother to tell me anything at all!?"
You ask about my conscience
And I offer you my soul
Duo sighed, "I told you because I thought you wanted to know."
"I did want to know! Now," she hesitated, "now I'm not so sure."
"I trust the guys. I love them, even." Duo also got to his feet. He ran one hand through his long bangs, fidgeting slightly. "But we're not friends. When you asked me your questions, I wanted to answer them. Because you're one of the only friends that I've got."
"Be my friend then," Hilde snapped. "Stop hiding things from me."
Duo's face hardened. "There are some things that are beyond my control. I won't tell you anything that doesn't directly involve me, you or our friendship."
"How can you live like that? How can you cling to it? Don't you ever have the urge to just unload it all?" Hilde shook her head.
"It's what I am." Duo turned away from her. "It's what I think I've always been. Sometimes I think that I was born to be alone. Please, just accept the fact that there are some secrets which aren't mine to share."
You ask if I'll grow to be a wise man
Well I ask if I'll grow old
"This all happened years ago! You are living in the past! Let go of it, Duo. Think of yourself. What about the future?"
"The future?" Duo gave her a bitter laugh. "I've never thought about the future. We fought for the future of _others_. We all went into this believing; knowing that we would die. We weren't _supposed_ to survive."
"Well think about it now!" Hilde was shaking with anger. His cheerful exterior had been nothing but a disguise, hiding a
despairing fatalist. How could he have lied to her?! "The others are all going on with their lives!"
Duo spun to face her, his long tail of hair arcing in the air behind him as he moved. "Are they?"
He moved closer to her, gliding across the floorboards. "Look a little more closely. Wufei is just beginning to cautiously explore what life is. He lived a very sheltered existence before his life was brought to a screeching halt by the war. Trowa is living behind a mask even now. He doesn't know what he wants. Quatre is reaching out to the future, all right. He's trying desperately to atone for every bad thing that happened, no matter who did it. Heero is... existing. Like Trowa, he still isn't sure what to do with himself." He was only inches away now, his eyes blazing with a hot anger that was entirely Duo. "We threw away everything that made us normal in order to survive. We turned ourselves into something totally alien so that we could try to put the damn human race back together. Forgive me if it's taking me a while to adjust!"
You ask me if I've known love
And what it's like to sing songs in the rain
Well I've seen love come
And I've seen it shot down
And I've seen it die in vain
Hilde sagged against the bed like a deflating balloon. "I, I'm sorry."
"So am I," Duo snapped. He moved away again, but went no further than the foot of the bed.
When he spoke again his voice was tired. "I haven't had a real friend since I was about eight, Hilde. I'm a little out of practice."
"No friends, no one to trust," her voice trailed off. "Isn't there anyone out there for you, Duo?"
He gave her a rueful smile over one shoulder before swinging around the post at the foot of the bed to look at her directly. "Probably not. Love is a decision. I don't feel comfortable enough with the idea, I guess. Love _is_ trust, you know. And vice versa."
Hilde blinked. "You know, I never thought of it that way. And you're all still single. Even Heero."
"Especially Heero," Duo told her.
"But I thought.... That is, he and Relena...."
Duo smiled more broadly at her confusion. "Oh, Heero has feelings for Relena, all right. Respect and protectiveness, mostly. He's really very fond of her. But they're from two totally opposing worlds. Despite everything they do, I don't think that either of them will ever truly understand the other."
"What about Quatre, then?" Hilde asked, eyes wide.
"Quatre loves and trusts almost everyone. It's one of his more endearing flaws," Duo sighed.
Hilde bristled. "Flaws?!"
"Down, girl," Duo waved his hands at her. "I don't want to start another fight here. He's got too much money and too much influence. He's going to get his fingers burned one of these days."
"He hasn't yet," Hilde snapped.
"That's because he has a very well developed sense of villainy," Duo told her. "He can usually see the bad guys coming.."
Shot down in a blaze of glory
Take me now but now the truth
I'm going out in a blaze of glory
"Usually." Heero's voice came from the doorway, startling them both. "But not always."
"Heero," Duo nodded to his friend.
"How long have YOU been there?" Hilde demanded, turning her ire on a new target.
"Since just before Duo's psychological dissection of his non-friends," Heero told her flatly.
"And you didn't SAY anything?!" she demanded.
"It was all fairly accurate." Heero shrugged and dropped his duffel on the floor, turning a little to lean on the door frame to address Duo. "You were a bit off on Trowa, but overall it was all right."
"How could you just eavesdrop like that?" Hilde growled.
Both men turned blank looks on her. "You were shouting," Heero explained patiently.
"And he's heard it all before," Duo shrugged. "It's not as if we were discussing state secrets."
He winced as Hilde's expression got even darker. "No doubt he's heard all those before as well!"
Heero raised an eyebrow at Duo, who simply shook his head and spread his arms helplessly.
Hilde gnashed her teeth in frustration. "I still can't believe that you'd trust Wufei before you'd trust me!"
"Wufei is perfectly trustworthy," Heero told her.
"Homicidal existential quandaries aside," Duo added, smirking slightly.
"How can you defend him after what he did?" Hilde asked in disbelief. "Forgive and forget is one thing, but how can you trust him?"
Lord I never drew first
But I drew first blood
I'm the devil's son
Call me young gun
"He did what he thought was right." That was the end of the argument, as far as Heero was concerned.
"I can't say that any of us are really comfortable around him," Duo added, "but he was sort of out of touch with reality. He didn't set out to betray us, it was more a sort of side-effect."
Hilde stared at them both, angry tears springing up in her eyes. "I don't understand you. I don't understand you at all."
"Look at the picture," Heero suggested.
"What?!" Hilde looked at the man as if he had lost his mind.
"Look at the picture," he repeated, gesturing toward the painting across the room. Duo, uncharacteristically, said nothing.
She moved across the room, letting her eyes trail across the familiar faces. She couldn't decide if Heero was trying to be helpful or just confusing. "I still don't understand."
Her right hand was suddenly captured in a grip of iron. Heero had come up behind her unnoticed, and taken her hand in his own. She gasped involuntarily as he pulled her fingers to trace the lines of Wing where it loomed over his own figure. She had never seen Heero touch anyone voluntarily. The experience was unnerving, to say the least.
"You're looking, but you're not seeing," he told her. "Try it again."
Trying to ignore the fact that this was _Heero Yuy_ looming over her, Hilde obeyed. Her eyes followed the familiar lines of Wing as he drew her fingers swiftly across the glass that protected the painting. It wasn't until he tugged her hand gently across the helmet of Deathscythe that she finally saw what he wanted her to.
"They're damaged!"
Heero let go over her wrist and stepped away. She continued to scan the painting, trying to see what else she had missed. The image of the publicly distributed poster had kept coming between her and the reality of the painting, she realized. The carefully blurred faces, the gleaming lines of the Gundams.... "The poster is a touch-up," she whispered.
"Yes." Heero continued to watch her carefully as she tried to memorize all the tiny changes between the two.
The Gundams were all damaged, to one degree or another. Burn marks adorned the formerly gleaming bodies and several of the helmets were obviously broken. After a few minutes, she redirected her attention to the exquisitely detailed forms of the pilots themselves.
"Who painted this?" she asked suddenly. Her fingers stopped next to the expression of almost heart-rending pain that was worn by the pilot of Gundam 05. "This wasn't done from pictures, or by a casual acquaintance. Who did this?"
"Keep looking," Heero told her.
Quatre looked as though he was on the edge of tears. Heero's jaw was clenched unhappily. Trowa's face had no expression at all, which wasn't surprising, but it was the vacantness of shock or horror rather than his normal exterior calm. And Duo.... Duo wasn't looking at the viewer at all. His head was tilted slightly downwards, and he was staring at his boots. He was recognizable, but whatever look his features bore was almost entirely obscured by his bangs.
Hilde stopped, her fingers resting gently on the brass tag that labeled the painting. "''Victory,'" she read again, her voice soft. The word seemed suddenly wrong.
"That's what the war meant to us," Heero told her. "That was our victory. War solves nothing, in the end. People die, lives are destroyed and the rest of the world goes on about its business."
"Duo?" Hilde's voice was lost as she turned to her friend, begging him to say something comforting.
"I painted that picture," he spread his arms outward in a gesture that combined confession with resignation. "Relena wanted something inspiring or uplifting. I gave her reality."
"She couldn't accept the reality, so she had it changed," Heero added. He was looking for something in Hilde's face using the same narrow, piercing gaze that Duo had turned on her earlier. She stared back, defeated and confused.
She had followed OZ with all her heart, believing in their dream of peace and order. Duo had shattered all that with just a few words and gestures. She had followed him then, betraying her previous dream and embracing the grim reality he had shown her. But somewhere in the back of her mind, the Gundam pilots were brave heroes who fought for honor and justice. They didn't just fight for survival, or because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They struggled against the odds because they were the champions of humanity, not because they had no other choice.
The war was over. The peace would last, this time. They were heroes and they would protect that peace.
Wouldn't they?
"I don't understand," she whispered, searching the face before her. "I don't think I want to."
Heero looked almost disappointed. "I know."
"I have to go home." Hilde turned and left the room, aware that both men were watching her go and equally aware that Duo would not come after her.
''I'm not a part of his world,' she told herself bitterly. ''And I never will be.'
Each night I go to bed
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
"That went better than I had expected."
Duo gave Heero a look of total disbelief. "'Better?'"
End Part One
Truth
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