GW-6x9: After-words

[GW/6x9] 2009 Valentine's fic, 2010 May edit.
It sat between them all their lives, comprehended, never understood; and even though it breaks your heart, there isn't any other way for them to have lived. It is not light and fluffy in time for the season. But then, neither are they... At least, not on the outside.

A Valentine's offering to lost souls.

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After-Words

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Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.
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Afterwards, when everything that could have been done had been done and everything that should have been said had been said, only then, did he realise his mistake. He really did love her.

It had sat between them all their lives, comprehended, never understood; and even though his heart, if he thought he had any, would have broken with the irony, he could neither mourn nor think of any other way for them to have lived. He'd always thought of love as some vague, hormonally driven need to breed, a survival mechanism that keeps the human race from warring to the last man (or woman), a ritual whose motions he could imitate but never mean. 'Love' was a cheap little word, a beggared whore hanging on the corner of every lip, every advertisement and movie screen. Times change. Trends change. The lie remains the same.

Every day, everything around you tells you that love and happiness are basic human endowments that happen simply because you exist. Is the human spirit so shallow that it would demand this lie? Yes.

He was… not better, just, different. More awake, more perceptive. Where others see roses, he saw the corpses that fed the roses.

Of course he believed in love, he merely did not believe himself -or anyone, for that matter- capable of it. Not in the way he believed in love, the grand, all-sacrificing, all-encompassing, all-understanding Love.

She accused him of being a romantic, but she was the one who then drunkenly informed him that Love was dead, had died, along with Treize Khushrenada. He was surprised, having been under the impression that she hated the last commander of Organization of the Zodiac.

"Maybe, I don't know," she admitted the night they decided to try the crude alcohol they had concocted out of space rations, odd bits of Martian lichen and hummingbird food, "but he was the last known man capable of such folly, so you should never expect me to die for you either."

He paused to decide if he was disappointed to hear her say the last, but the moment faded, and then she drags him away from the project when he accidentally reveals his plans to make himself the King of Mars, and he remembers why he does not drink with her.

She told this story at his wedding and presented no apologies for having foiled his ambitions. It had been 4 years, 6 months and 22 days since he'd last been in the same room as her, at that point. Even in the same company, the path of a pioneering deep-space engineer rarely crossed with that of a director of Human Resource. She had not changed.

She astonished everyone by turning up beaming, with a pixie-like red-head hanging off her arm. He had expected to see her with his boss. After all, it was Quatre who gave them both jobs without a second thought when they'd returned to the Earth Sphere from Mars, so when he heard through the tabloids of a mysterious dark-haired beauty frequenting the young entrepreneur's private apartment,

"Naturally, I thought of you."

"Naturally." She asked in those cool, dulcet tones of hers, almost as low as a man's. "Jealous?"

"Disappointed. I was looking forward to the cradle-robbing jokes at your wedding."

She chuckled and politely enquired, pray, how old his bride might be. Touché.

His sister cornered him on the balcony and demanded with red-rimmed eyes under a clear sea of stars if there wasn't someone else there that night that he should be marrying. He said no.

He does not regret it, even years later, when his throat closed up at the sight of her walking down the aisle in the most beautiful dress he could find and the softly falling tears drenched through the back of his glove.

"You saw him. How can you still go through with this?" He hears a familiar sob behind closed doors, pleading with her as it had with him.

"Because we have not done the things in our lives for the reasons you think," his oldest friend sighed, and a part of him was relieved. Until that moment, that part had always wavered uncertainly about her, wondering if, somehow, she was still waiting for him to ask her to dance, and if he was still waiting for her to take his hand.

He puts her wedding picture on his desk, next to one she took of him and Elise. The empty space on the other side is reserved for Relena.

She leaves Winner Corporations to work for the Earth Sphere Unified Nation's Mars Terraforming Initiative. He forgets to call. She does not notice. But hers is the number his nerveless fingers dial when news reaches him that Foreign Minister Darlian had been shot down in high orbit over Earth.

"I'm here," she picks up on the first ring and says effortlessly before he could breath a word, as if it hadn't been 3 years, 8 months and 17 days since they'd last spoken. "I'm holding her hand right now." No explanations, no questions. She does not tell him not to worry. She knows him better than that.

He clutched the phone to his chest and kissed her picture madly, because he was too far away to grab her. And because he had no means of getting to Earth until morning, he went home to his wife.

He was not a man capable of what most people call love, though, like many in his position, he pretended. Some days, with Elise, he could almost believe his own pretence. "Is that wrong?" He asked as his baby sister announces to the world that she was going on a sabbatical to track down the man she loves and put a ring on his finger.

"No," she said, deep purple eyes wandering away to seek out the woman she had married. "It's the best anyone can really hope for."

She makes plans to move to Mars to oversee the final stages of the Human Rehabilitation phase. It will take years. They may not come back. Her partner wants her to ask him for a baby they could raise there. Elise is thrilled. He had not realised the women had become friends.

He is nervous, he realises, of seeing her body and showing her his. Which is strange, because they had always been open about their nakedness back when they were soldiers. Military life did not leave much room for modesty. How many times have they torn apart each other's clothes to save lives? Seven. But who's counting?

Anyway, the point is moot. The baby was conceived in a test-tube from his sperm and her ovule and carried to term by her wife. It was a boy. They joke about naming it Treize, then quietly decided against it.

For its second birthday, weeks before their scheduled move, he presented her with the deed to a house that will be built on Mars. It promised to be the best of everything the red planet had to offer. "Which isn't much," he admitted, having lived there once, "but the Prince of Mars should have the best of everything Mars has to offer."

She snorted and told him she knows nothing of raising princes. Perhaps he would like to have the baby back?

He grinned and assured her she'll do fine. After all they've survived, how difficult could it be to raise a baby? Feed it well, keep it clean, and never, ever teach it to pilot anything.

She laughs shakily into her glass so he wouldn't see that she was crying.

He shuffles awkwardly next to her and holds her for the first time. She is scared. She thinks Cassandra is planning on leaving her. She was right.

He makes her keep the Martian house after she gives everything else to her ex-wife and son. She will need a home, he insists. "No matter how little it means now, you will be glad of it later. I was."

Her wife takes an order of protection against her and has it delivered to her at the spaceport, in front of her new crew. She accepts the papers with dignity.

The only thing she did before throwing herself into her work was leave him a voicemail reporting her safe landing. She declines all social interaction. He puts off calling back, unable to think of anything important enough to warrant interrupting life on Mars. Two years pass by the time he gets around to returning her call. "Today, Lady Une died and Chang took her place. I sent flowers in your stead."

There is a long pause on the other end.

Relena is made Ambassador to Mars. It is a sort of exile, he decided, but his sister was keen to go. He receives pictures in the mail from of Relena and the house. There is a small Thank You note, and nothing else.

Relena writes home, filling in blanks that they did not feel the need to fill. When does he think he can visit? He should come see the wonders she has done with the once uninhabitable rock. The Martian immigrants adore her. She was training young engineers to become MS pilots and designing new suits for the construction and space-exploration fields. He leaked the letter to Quatre. It had been more difficult to convince himself that continued use of that technology was the right thing to do than the ex-Gundam pilot.

Quatre wants to send him out there. He has been an integral part of the Board of Directors for nearly a decade and would be an acceptable representative. He said no. This was something the head of Winner Corporation should see to personally. He was no longer interested in creating history.

Quatre stays with her for three months. He is secretly disappointed when the boy returns without her.

Mars prospered. Elise grew agitated with life on L-4. "Let's move to Earth," he said. He had friends and assets there. They last six months until he discovers her affairs. He tries to let it slide. Elise moves out. He covered it up. He didn't want anyone to know.

She arrived the day he was served divorce papers. He found her under a streetlamp across from the old Brussels Presidential Residence monument, or she found him wandering aimlessly through empty streets that were no longer familiar to either of them. It doesn't really matter which.

It would have been easy to mistake her for someone else. Her hair was a wild shoulder-length mane threaded sparsely with grey. There were lines in her face and scars on her hands that he did not recognise. "I had to come see this place again," she said, as if it hadn't been 3 years, 8 months and 17 days since he'd last heard from her.

He stood beside her and watched the snow fall.

She should have married his sister, he would joke still more years later. It would have kept Relena from obsessing over her vanished Gundam pilot and the three of them could have been one happy, uncomplicated, family.

"Happy?" She'd snort, sprawled out next to him on the rich shaggy rug in front of her fireplace or the plush leather couch in his living room. "Uncomplicated?"

She would remind him of the disaster that was their great co-habitation experiment of A.C. 199. They had just returned from their first tour of Mars and found normal lives as anonymous, everyday people. She thought she would never let him out of her sight again. He thought one day he would orchestrate the perfect proposal and make her marry him.

Their bad days had been apocalyptical. Sharing the same space tied them down to the people they had been, reminded them too much of things they wanted to let go of. It forced them into patterns of thinking that they did not like and could not shake. Their house came to resemble a bunker. They picked fights to hide their troubles and tore their home apart to vent their frustrations. He took to the streets in acts of vigilantism. She moonlighted to stop him. She could never feel that she had done enough for peace and he could never truly believe that the war was done with him.

"I thought you'd learnt your lesson when you married a woman who wasn't trained to use deadly force." He did. They both did.

Normalcy had been difficult, after the war. Still was.

No matter how vehemently they told themselves that they were too old and settled for such shenanigans now, the temptation was there: an underlying tension that built up into a unique hum in their bones, pitting them against each other in pointless competition until it becomes appeaseable only by the thrill of diving headlong into bloody oblivion. So he stayed on Earth and she stayed on Mars, and their visits happened as few and far between as they could stand to be together.

The young man found them on L-2, building go-karts out of scrapped parts on a long weekend. He'd walked across half the colony to tell them his name. His name is Lionel. They already knew. He is nineteen. He likes old cars and baseball. They tell him they'd named him after the Leo suit. They are surprised when he understands, and not so much when they discover they had nothing in common save her raven-wing hair and his clear-sky eyes. His silhouette against the artificial sunset reminds them of the future that had left them behind. They go home early.

Relena is held hostage by Martian separatists tired of being ignored.

He was making bolognaise in her kitchen when Chang and several other men wearing ESUN badges burst through the door. She came downstairs in fluffy bunny slippers and wanted to know who to thank for the damage. The Preventers have been disbanded for fifteen years. These days, Chang worked for some Internal Security Initiative; people whose knee-jerk response to the Earth Ambassador's kidnapping was to place her brother in "protective custody". They are more nervous of his loose-cannoning than they were of the terrorists.

Words are exchanged. He surrenders quietly on her recommendation. What else was there to do?

He lets them cuff him behind his back. She draws him down to her. "For luck," she whispers, and kisses him for the first and only time. Her hands are icy-cold. They burn the back of his neck and the side of his jaw. Her mouth is dry. She slips a lock-pick under his tongue. He wonders briefly how she'd learnt to do that.

He waits until they've lost sight of the main roads. Times have changed. They don't train secret agents like they used to. Chang is the only one to give him any trouble. But then, he is not as spry as he used to be.

He stuffs his tie in Chang's mouth so he wouldn't have to listen to that rusty washboard voice and lets the ex-Preventer watch him chain his men together. Hopefully the boy will learn something this way.

Two old suits waited quietly on the dirt path he took back to the house: a Barton Foundation Serpent, and a first-production Taurus from the Sanq Kingdom armoury. The latter stood tall, backed against its crouched, inactive, brother. Instincts honed from a lifetime of battle told him it was occupied. He lingered a moment, admiring the picture they made against the Marian landscape, and hauled himself into the Serpent's open cockpit. His Preventer jacket hung on the back of the pilot's seat.

"There are advantages to being only a footnote in your war record after all," she remarked in wry humour as his comms sparked into life. She had cut her hair back to service length.

Questions clouded his mind as his hands warmed the controls. 'How did she get her hands on these?' 'Where has she been hiding them?' 'Why did she never tell him?' 'Would she marry him?' He settled for something that matched the boyish, feral grin on her face.

"Why do you get the better suit?"

"I'm less rusty," she smirked.

The suits had long been demilitarised. In truth, one of the new Construction-class suits would have been more threat. He does not argue her choice. The new suits would not have the same sense of tradition. They would not mean the same.

"Try not to destroy anything," she requests nonchalantly. This is her planet, her people, her town. Even when they're in the wrong, she cannot abide hurting them too much. She has always been this way. He could never decide if he admires or hates that about her.

She lets him take the lead.

"This is the ghost of Preventer Wind," he tells the arrogant upstarts. "Let's not make a repeat of the Brussels Incident."

The separatists couldn't surrender quickly enough.

By the time Chang arrived, the Combat-class Mobile Suits had vanished. If they were recognised on display in the Martian Museum of Mobile Suits afterwards, nothing could be proven.

She cracks her hip getting out of the bathtub. You get old, it happens. The doctor puts her to bed with a prescription of painkillers. He turns up with a flask of chicken soup to gloat. They play chess. She wins. He plays her house-slave for a week.

It became clear that she wasn't getting better. She finally confesses to osteosarcoma. He grabs her doctor by the throat and throws him against the wall, furious that he had been kept in the dark, angrier still that nothing was being done to save her. She orders him to let the poor man go. It was her decision.

"It's a sign, and I can't think of a good enough reason to put it off any longer," she shrugged when the doctor had gone. Really, people like her and him, they should have died back then with the Gundams.

He stormed out of her bedroom. Twenty minutes and a shattering of glass later, he returned in shame. Her life was her own. He had no right to be angry. He was scared, to tell the truth. She was the only thing that had kept him sane these past thirty years. She smiled helplessly as she picked bits of her bathroom mirror out of his knuckle and watched him bandage his own hand.

He brings her the best wine in the known universe to wash down the ancient cyanide pills she'd picked out of the lining of her Preventer jacket. They do not say good-bye.

She asked to be cremated and kept in her house. He does not notice until the moment after she disappears into the kiln that she had not had any black in her hair for a while.

"She loved you," his sister accused after the service. "She loved you more than anything in the world for more than sixty years, and you couldn't spare her a single tear at her funeral." He does not correct her. He says nothing at all.

She left everything to her MS Design Company and a letter for Relena. To him, she gave the house he had given her and her OZ service tags. That, he decides, says everything that could be said about him and her.

Relena cries over the sealed letter, enough for all three of them. He remembers a time long ago, her voice echoing in his ears from behind a locked door: "we have not done the things in our lives for the reasons you think."

He could appease his sibling easily by telling her he'd loved her too, but that would be a lie. Love was all-sacrificing, all-encompassing, all-understanding, and it had died with Treize Khushrenada's uncredited sacrifice for the world. This is why she could, would, never live or die just for him.

He sells his Earthly things and moves back to Mars to be closer to his sister, his last remaining family. He does not bother changing anything in the house. Her unfinished sketches litter the walls in the basement workshop. The back door still bears scruff marks from when Chang's men kicked it in. The upstairs bathroom mirror stays broken. The third stair squeaks. The second hallway light flickers after being on for a few hours. A loose spring in her lazyboy sticks in his neck. He is getting too old to fix things that could just be tolerated.

He leaves her urn on the breakfast table, where her lawyer or a courier had set it down before he'd moved in. He uses it as a paperweight for his mail. One day, in the midst of what was thought to be the sandstorm of the century, he takes it outside and tips all of its contents on the front porch step.

He'd barely stepped away when she swirled up in dance, as beautiful and graceful as he remembers from the OZ Christmas Ball of A.C. 193. She was as natural in the middle of the ballroom floor as she seemed repelling invaders on a battlefield. He does not ask her to dance. She does not take his hand. He watches her hair whip about her face in the harsh Martian wind as she considers the faraway dawn.

He goes back inside, out of the storm, and a part of her goes with him, through the front hall, past the living room, coming to a stop at the kitchen entrance, where she used to watch him cook with the most bemused expression.

The rest surged up to embrace the sky, and space beyond it, then settled sneakily to envelope their house. And it is only when the cold porcelain jar jabs him in the ribs in bed that he realises he had forgotten to put the urn down.

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