Chapter Text
Northern Tunisia, AC 195
We've been on the coast here for three days now while Quatre tries to come to terms with theft, or so I'm gauging. With a boat, we can cross the Mediterranean. In Europe we'll finally be set to make our assault — it's not the right term, but it's the clearest one I've got — on the Sanc Kingdom. Quatre's been muttering something about elephants and a general who backed the wrong God, but I don't feel like hearing about a failed expedition.
We've crossed so much land ever since setting foot in Asia, that it's only now, at the edge of a different continent, with the start of this sea throwing light in my vision again, that the thought repeats itself to me, now loud and clear as any training instruction—
What are he and I going to do if Relena doesn't welcome us, assuming we finally make it to Sanc? Wander the rest of the planet? Find a way back to Space? Or do we finally end this association and go our separate ways?
But where he doubts, I'm certain, and where I doubt, he's certain, and I'm balancing his scales, whatever gets displaced.
My memory’s not certain, I know that; not like his with its elephant range. But this is the vaguest mission I can ever recall. (Probably why I never officially accepted.) Something with an objective that depends on someone else's goodwill is beyond my comprehension.
Which is why Quatre keeps studying these criminals, trying to be more organized than they are. He overheard the name, and I could see the wheels instantly start to turn in his head, the plan coming to life from sand.
He's in sandals, sunglasses and an overshirt. Even I'm wearing long pants, and sunglasses from countries ago that I still don't need. He's determined that we look purposeful and unobtrusive, or at least more like tourists and less like people in need of the truant officer. I also don't need binoculars, so I tell him to keep his own sunglasses on and answer his periodic questions about the things I can tell from a distance. We've finally left the restaurant, kept surveilling them, and now he sees what he wants.
They keep it in this warehouse at the port, and apparently it's best we pay a visit after the sun’s finally disappeared and everything's covered in the blue and indigo of shadows.
“Everything proceeds in stages,” he says. The words are half for the air and only half for me. It's true. It's even sensible. I just can't shake the feeling we're in different stages, most of the time.
“Why are you so determined to get this one?” I finally ask. Just his ethics?
“I have a lot of experience with a similar model.”
“Similar enough?”
“Should be.”
Fine. But he glances sideways at me, and something flashes out of the dimness. “Give my ego a boost, Heero.”
If there's something to be said to that, I don't know what it is.
He's shaking his head, ever-so-slightly.
“I'll congratulate you when this is over,” I allow.
Who leaves a guard on a boat in a locked building? Quatre's right; this must be the level of tech and power we need for the crossing. There's a segment of people who operate outside the law who prefer extraneous employment and conspicuous consumption. Even J liked his driver and his leisure time. Still…
The man is bored, not expecting company. He really is there for show. A couple of punches, a strike in the right place; things my body barely even registers, but he's down. Quatre's rummaging through the inert mass of fabric with oddly expert precision.
Maybe I should just accept that everything about him will surprise me somehow.
Vietnam, earlier
“We're here, Heero.” He nudges me out of a taxi, into the downpour. “Wake up.”
‘Here’ is the untraceable email he got me to send, after getting me to cover the access of systems where he has perfectly legitimate passwords, despite insisting he'd be locked out. Some available corporate property in a corner of the database. I never asked him whose name he was signing with, let alone what the contents were about.
New Guinea and Indonesia were a packed blur, and much of it was dark. It's the space, now, the way it's just me and him and space — the sudden absence of other people — that tells me there's been a change on the agenda.
There's a bed. That's all I really register.
I don't know what time it is when I regain consciousness, just that it's even darker and still pouring. There aren't too many places to go looking for him, even if my ears didn't already know. I change into one of the pile of t-shirts and loose cotton pants we picked up in a street market. There's a mix of soft, nubbly carpet and wide wooden flooring here, apart from large cool tiles in the bathroom and kitchen. Easier to tell with no need for shoes.
He's standing in the living room in a similar outfit, darker than all the pale furniture, silhouetted by the lashing rain and the enormous wall of the window.
“You're up.” It's so late, he's apparently fine with being obvious. He hasn't been sleeping; he's just managed to desocialize his hair with too much time on his own and the clutching and raking he does when he thinks no one's watching.
At least, I don't think he stuck his finger in the light socket.
“Why are you?”
He doesn't move, still with his hand on the glass. “Don't know. I didn't want to disturb you… and too many thoughts.”
“You think we'll sleep better on the floor?”
Finally, he glances over. “No, the point of coming here was a bed. And the bathroom. And some space.”
“You sleeping in the bathtub?”
“No.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Then come.” He's warm, under my fingers. Tense, but he softens a bit.
“All right.”
Out of the dark blur, I remember all the people he talked to to get us here, for all the various purposes. How he’d be smiling most of the time. Easy, sincere, relatively formulaic. He’d mastered his ‘interact with others’ training in ways I never could. Language and situation were completely irrelevant. Most of the time, they'd start smiling back.
“Tell me what makes you happy.” His voice rises from the darkness on the other side of the bed.
And I am so far removed from being 01 at this point, the memory slips in the right circuits quietly, easily.
“I was 10, I think. We were staying on this VIP colony. I snuck out at 4 in the morning, because there was a horse…”
“What color?”
“Tan? Yellow? It was dark, mostly. Anyway, I still don't know if he’d been ridden before, but…”
“You managed.”
“We went down to the water, and… there should be something faster than a gallop.” But it was long enough that the sun and the color took the stars in the windows out. I can still see it. “I had sand in my hair… I had sand on my entire body the rest of that day.”
“Comfortable.” He doesn't mean that.
“I only noticed when it washed off me.”
Exhausted-sincere instead of sleepy-sarcastic. “Half-wild horses. You really are fascinating.”
So I venture. “What makes you happy?”
“Poetry. Finding out people learned how to say everything so transcendentally that we needn't bother.”
I don't think I'll be providing that to him any time soon.
“I looked and there is no soulmate down here, from now I look for my friend in the sky.” As if he's proving my point.
Then out of the quiet. “...All that time, and you never told that story to Trowa? Or anybody?” he mumbles.
“Nobody's asked me.”
“In Arabic, we'd say you flew without wings.”
I wait for something else. But he's asleep.
It's rain and continued rain in this place, even with daylight; more water than a colony would ever see and with no disposal. I could manage in a flood, but I don't know how people on Earth who've never met J do.
“It's okay. God promised not to do it again,” Quatre murmurs, and I'm not sure if he's expecting me to ignore that even as I remind myself yet again: he can't actually read my mind.
“What, you specifically?”
“No. Long time ago. From what I can tell, this is relatively typical weather this time of year, for this part of the world. I was counting on it.”
I let that last bit go for the moment, even as I put down my book.
“Are you going to explain why your family has property when you weren't allowed to set foot here?”
“Since before the Yuy assassination. Long before. Even the Alliance wasn't so short-sighted as to go up against people with very deep Earth roots and interests, colonists or not. If they'd tried to separate us from it, we would have made it difficult. Unpleasant. Very ugly... Trust me.” It's unusual, seeing his smile and combat eyes. “Father was grateful they decided to have other priorities.”
“You could have been fighting earlier.”
“Yes— or I could have been a lawyer by now. That kind of warfare.”
“Isn't it about persuading people? You could have been fine.”
He hunches in, rubs his left bicep. “Just means I don't know what I'm currently doing…”
The weather is just short of violent, there is no scheduled end, and in theory, I'm aware it can get even worse. “I don't understand why anyone would ever choose to live like this.”
“Why do you think so many people were glad to move to Space? It’s the Promised Land.” He's homesick, on top of everything. Or at least semi-nostalgic. I can hear it. “But then Earth is too, sometimes… What do you think? From what you've seen?”
“That people make the same mistakes wherever they are.”
“Oh, Heero…” He looks so defeated, I regret opening my mouth. I get up, try standing closer.
“But I think— I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand. And I like to think one day I will.”
The corner of his mouth flicks, even as he sighs and quotes. “‘Never hope without despair, and never despair without hope’.”
“Besides, if everyone thought like me, I wouldn't see the point.”
My face is trapped in-between his hands. There goes my heart rate. There goes the water rushing by. There goes the world into the color hiding between green and blue again. “I would see it. There is always, always a point to you. Even if you need someone else to make it.”
“Why, who made it to you?”
Gone as suddenly as they were there. It was Trowa, wasn't it? I was there; I could have saved my breath and figured it out myself. Now I miss the way his hands felt.
“Just rest, Heero.” He's back to shaking his head. “You really need to.”
“Why do you do that?” The words come faster than the wisdom.
“Do what?”
“Say you're doing things for other people's benefit when it's really for you.”
Taut, pale and flushed, all at the same time. He's startled, and he really doesn't like it.
“...Partly because I was taught to put myself last.” His voice is low, giving out almost nothing, but there's some kind of phosphorescence in those eyes… “I think you can understand?”
Yes, even if our applications aren't remotely similar.
This place is glass, mostly. There's not much in the way of roof to soften the endless torrent of water, even if I try listening to the barely-visible ocean. With another dusk comes pathways of candles — most of them thick and set in glass; smaller ones clustering where they won't be knocked over. Defiant bits of fire against an imbalance. I still don't understand.
“Did the electricity go out?”
“Do people need to know we're here?” Quatre replies, lightly.
I shrug. “You'll have problems seeing before I will. You were relying on this kind of weather?”
“Yes. This is especially bad. No crowds. No visitors. Fewer people to remember we were here.”
“You factored that in against people remembering the only two foreigners determined to show up in the middle of this.”
Everything sharpens; the air, his eyes, and his voice. “Of course... and I realized I'm getting too tired to care, and on the verge of making more mistakes.”
I'm starting to feel like responding to him isn't the best way to go.
Quatre has decided this also calls for more water — many, many glasses of it containing varying levels, all of which he's carrying out from the kitchen and setting up on what he told me was the “coffee table”.
I don't even ask.
“Isn't it a water table now?”
I get a flicker of his eyelids in acknowledgement of that, but in the meantime he makes another trip, returning with more glasses and… forks.
Water and forks. And also chopsticks; the heavy kind.
“Quatre?”
“Yes?”
“Is this the start of another Gundam?”
“I don't think so…” He's still absorbed in his glasses. “I don't build those for entertainment, Heero.”
“But you—”
“I said Sandrock was ‘a different kind of fun’...” He sips some liquid from multiple glasses. “You think I'm going mad again?”
I settle for ‘look’, rather than ‘reply’.
“Well, keep watching.” And then he nods. “ ‘I always feel like… somebody's watching me’ . Thanks, Heero.”
“I don't understand.”
But he crouches down, hits the glasses with the forks…and there is noise. No— music.
It's a shock that comes after a minute or so of watching him. This is how he follows his feelings. After that I can't look away.
He looks up, eventually, when he sees he hasn't driven me out of the room.
“Here, I owe you this one. Fleetwood. Sound familiar?”
Actually, yes. My brain must really not have categorized it as noise.
Quatre's speaking with the notes. “It's only right that you should play the way you feel it… but listen carefully to the sound.”
Finally, he switches the non-analog music player on to something fast and loud, but just when I think he wants a break, he gets up and… moves around the whole room. It's chaotic and idiosyncratic, his limbs are shaking, and his eyes are closed most of the time.
“Never done this, have you?”
Yes, rolling my eyes would be appropriate now. “Why would I want to?”
“Dance like no one’s watching?”
I am watching. Although he said he always felt— “Dancing?”
He's in curious mode. “You said you could do this, right?” He's miming the sort of formal patterns I do know, box-stepping and gliding with the air, even when I know there's a total disconnect in the soundtrack. “So how do you know how to dance, if you've never heard the music?”
“You find out when your cover’s blown— there'll be somebody there to break your fall.”
That stops him. He can't even decide whether to smile or frown. “Seriously?”
“Or, same way muscle memory works for anything else.”
There's a glint of comprehension. “That's why you only know set moves.”
It doesn't make his type of ‘dancing’ seem more approachable. But I like watching him, even with this. Most people don't throw off light the way he does.