Chapter Text
Heero isn’t always the best at finding the right thing to say. Whether it’s about things outside himself, or things within himself - expressing his needs, finding some way to be understood - he has found that oftentimes, it’s best to just stay quiet.
Still, his therapist warns him off of this. He has been taught not to call out for help in times that others might, he’s been told. Heero doesn’t linger on precisely how those instincts were removed, excised, from him. At times, during the war, he had managed to get help anyway. This was usually only because of the kindness of others, and not because he’d told anyone what he needed.
Often that was because he lacked the language to describe those needs - something he should have been taught, when he was busy being taught other things.
Heero sits at the kitchen table in the small, comfortable apartment he shares with Duo. His pen carefully traces along a pad of paper, meticulously sketching. While sometimes he lacks language, he still understands many things. Duo has been one of those things.
Understanding himself is another.
They’d had a little time after the war, sheltered away in Sanc and then with the Maganacs, where they could figure things out - what they wanted with peace, and with each other. Moving on to a new colony and diving headfirst into college had been a new test of his fortitude. Without Duo with him, he would have fallen apart, he thinks.
He has learned so many things - how to actually order the food he wants in any given cafeteria, how to recognize the look on someone’s face when they don’t really care what you have to say, how to program the thermometrics of new-build colonies, how to use his body to make Duo writhe and call out his name.
He’s learned the words he needs to explain himself. Somehow, in its own different way, simply being understood is in itself a need just like hunger, or thirst. Heero draws a second perfect circle, where it just slightly overlaps the first.
“Like this,” he says, picking up the page and turning it over, holding it up. Duo watches it quizzically. He’s been turning and turning and turning his knife over in his fingers while Heero draws, but he stops it, laying it against the kitchen table.
“Heero,” Duo says, raking fingers through his hair. “I don’t get it. How can you be so sure?”
Gay, but not just gay. Not asexual, but not eager for one night stands or casual encounters. A man, but not necessarily by requirement.
The names and labels he watched his peers toy with and turn over, try on and take off, had value to them - ways to codify their needs, their personhood, so others could understand them. The black and white of it all is so helpful to them. It was helpful to Heero, too - to hear them, to research them, to see the way he could understand others with these new words. A simple way to understand how his classmates and peers wanted to connect with the people around them.
Still when applied to himself, they were like wearing yet another cheap uniform, sometimes. Not quite the right size or shape, hanging off him, or too tight, too restrictive.
Heero turns the page over and draws two long, straight, parallel lines. He turns the page so Duo can see it again.
“This is us,” he says, running a fingertip along the first line at the top of the page. “Since we talked about this.” Since Heero had tried to explain himself. They were just terms, just things he tried on, took off.
“Heero, I just don’t get it,” Duo says again, sighing for the fifteenth time. He leans forward in his chair and then back, adjusting, never quite sitting still. “Are you unhappy with me?”
“No,” Heero says firmly. He realizes he probably sounds unhappy, and he relaxes his expression, but Duo doesn’t misunderstand him.
“Then what does any of this matter?”
It’s a fair question, Heero reasons, and Duo is right to be confused. It’s just been the two of them all this time - after the war, they’d clung together, inseparable, caught in each other’s gravity. Almost everything else had fallen away, although there were some who would still enter their orbit occasionally. The way that he and Duo had simply fallen into their pattern, fallen into each other’s beds, found themselves simply sleeping in one apartment, in one bed, cooking for two instead of one… it had all come easily.
It was the two of them, and it felt right. It hadn’t mattered what anyone else would call it, then.
But they’re in the world now, and sometimes, it does matter.
Heero breaths out through his nose. “It matters to me,” he says quietly, eyes tracing the lines on the page.
Duo’s phone rings, distantly from the table in the living room. As though it’s saved him, Duo practically leaps out of the chair and goes to find it, leaving Heero and his finely drawn, perfectly straight lines alone.
Weeks pass, and Heero doesn’t bring any of it up again. Their lines feel a mile apart, even though nothing has changed. He and Duo have the same rhythm - school, their separate internships, their kitchen table for dinner, their quiet parallel work, their noisy, demanding, desperate joinings, their shared bed afterward. They attend the same clubs and events as before, coming together again after to talk about them. Duo loves hearing about the different things Heero has come to realize about the world, and vice versa.
This, for whatever reason, has been the first real exception. They’re disagreed before, but never about anything like this - never about anything they couldn’t argue about or let lie or fuck out. Maybe because it’s too far from the surface. Maybe because it doesn’t really matter, after all.
Do things only matter if they change you? Heero considers. Do they only matter if they impact someone outside yourself?
Heero barely notices Duo sitting down at the table before him, flipping open his notebook and clicking open his pen. Heero’s eyes are pointed at his computer but he’s not been reading the words for a while, lost in his thoughts. It isn’t until Duo’s pen stops scratching across the paper and he picks up the cheap, limp notebook and tosses it across the table that Heero finally looks up. The notebook lands in front of him with a slap against the cheap veneer, rotated to appear right-side-up from where Heero is sitting.
There’s two hastily drawn lines scrawled in black ink across the width of the page. They start an inch apart, running parallel, before both of them turn inward and cross over. They do this again and again, meandering in a jagged but predictable pattern. At times, they loop over each other entirely. The pattern is mesmerising and beautiful - two lines that somehow have created something more complex and beautiful. It reminds Heero a little of Duo’s hair when he takes his time braiding it.
Heero takes his own time looking it over before he reaches the end of the design - two lines next to each other again, separated by an inch. It makes his chest ache to see it after taking in the complexity and beauty before. He glances up and meets Duo’s waiting gaze.
“I’ve been a real asshole,” Duo opens, and Heero sighs, sitting back from the table and closing his laptop. “Thanks for not arguing with me.” There’s no teeth behind it, and Heero doesn’t argue to compensate, waiting for Duo to keep speaking.
“I’m sorry I acted the way that I did.” Duo fidgets with his pen, spinning it in his fingers the way he does his knife. “I owe you some kinda explanation but I had to really… I had to figure it out.”
Heero swallows quietly, letting his hands fall flat on the top of the table. Duo is one of the smartest people he knows. If whatever it was had taken so much consideration from him, it means it was challenging, and in their lives that has rarely meant any good. Still, he glances at the drawing, the two lines interwoven. Duo starts speaking again.
“When you and I got together, I thought it was just because you didn’t know any better,” Duo admits in a rush. Once he gets the sentence out, he pauses for a breath before hitting the next beat. “You were so, so sheltered, man. Beyond sheltered. I thought you just didn’t know what you wanted.”
“I wanted you,” Heero says plainly, and Duo gives half a grin - the kind Heero knows Duo makes when he thinks something is too good to be true.
“Yeah,” Duo said, “but you didn’t know anything else.”
Any better, Heero’s mind connects. “I didn’t have to.”
Duo sighs, his own eyes tracing the pattern he drew. “Well,” he says, his voice falling low and quiet. “Now you do.”
Heero reaches out as quick as the wind and puts his hand over Duo’s. “This is not about not wanting you.”
“I know,” Duo says, still so quiet. “I think so, anyway.” His hand tenses underneath Heero’s but he doesn’t pull away. “I… I freaked out. I’m sorry.” Heero frowns, his brows furrowing, which sends Duo on another flurry of speech. “It just scared me. It’s always just been us. I thought you were like me.”
“And what is that?”
“Gay!” Duo says, throwing up his free hand, “or at least I thought so!”
“You’ve never thought about it?”
“Why would I?! It’s always been us. Like sure, other people can be hot, but I have you! You’re everything to me, Heero.” Duo’s voice cracks a little, and Heero pulls on his hand, trapping it between his warm palms.
“You are everything to me,” Heero murmurs, standing up from the table. It’s a little hard to do while still holding Duo’s hand, but he manages, walking to stand next to his partner’s chair. He crouches next to Duo’s legs, using one hand to stroke Duo’s knee through his dark jeans.
Duo rubs his fingers over Heero’s as he sighs again. It’s a rough sigh that Heero knows is not a good thing nor a bad thing. He stays still, watching his lover think.
“I talked to Carina about it,” Duo says quietly. Heero nods - he’s met Duo’s therapist just once. If he believed in fate, he’d thank it first for Duo, and second for Carina.
“What did she say?”
“That people who love each other move apart, sometimes,” Duo starts. Heero clenches his hand around Duo’s knee without thinking about it until he feels Duo’s hand clasp him. “She said when you come back together, you get to share the things you learned about yourself. You get to see each other in a new way.” Duo breathes and it’s a little jittery, but he tightens his grip on Heero’s hands.
“I see you.” He stays still while Heero leans in, pressing their heads together gently. They stay like that for a minute, taking in the sound of each other’s quiet breathing, their hands interlaced.
“I see a guy who would still pick me,” Duo says, and it lilts just a little like a question. Heero nods before tilting his head just so and kissing him carefully, waiting for Duo to lean in and kiss him back. When they pull apart again, Duo is smiling, though his dark lashes are damp. “Even if I’m not all there is.”
“You’re everything,” Heero says, and Duo believes it.