Axiom
Wake.
Breathe.
Move.
Live.
It's the same routine, every day, every week, every month that goes by, and it still doesn't get any easier. Doesn't feel any more normal.
He'd never planned to make it through alive, never wondered what he'd do, where he'd go, where he'd end up.
The world is picking up its scattered pieces and moving on, moving forward around him, but he's still stuck in that one moment, the morning after the war ended, when he woke up and realized—
—there was nothing left to fight.
Christmas Day, AC 195, and he'd gotten exactly what he supposed a part of him had always wanted—peace.
No more war, no more fighting, no more dying.
In some sick, twisted way, he found himself missing it. Not the bloodshed, as some might think, but the sense of purpose.
When he was fighting, at least, he knew exactly who he was and what he was meant to be doing.
In peace he is just an ordinary boy—no, just an ordinary man. He hasn't been a boy in a long, long time.
He looks in the mirror and doesn't know the face that looks back at him, the face he presents every day to the world, a laughing man, a kindly man, a man at peace with himself and his lot in life, a man that doesn't lie awake at night with thoughts and memories gnawing at his edges, tearing the ever-growing emptiness just a tad bit wider.
He wakes, and he breathes, and he moves, and he lives, but there's a difference, he comes to realize, between living and surviving, and with each passing day he becomes ever more unsure of which one he's doing.
He wonders if she knows. If she hears it, sometimes, when they laugh together over ration bars beneath the hood of another car, in the guts of another ship—in the spaces between words, in what he says and what he doesn't say. If she sees it in the lines and the shadows of his face, the painful truth that he doesn't know who he is or what he's meant to be doing and that he doesn't want to know that he doesn't.
Wonders if she knows she's living with a liar, tried and true and oh isn't it just so ironic, that stupid little motto, "I run and I hide but I never tell a lie?"
He's running, for certain. Hiding, too. And isn't it the truth, that the worst lie you can tell is the one to convince yourself that you're not?
Yes, I still exist. Yes, I'm still writing. ...how long has it been since I wrote/published something related to Gundam Wing?
Ah. Haha. Yeah. SinceIlastupdatedShadowsofYe sterdaytwoyearsagoahahahawho ops.
I'm...not even going to bother with apologies because it'll probably just happen again. Life, people, life. Every time I try to put fingers to keyboard to finish something, like, say, the next chapter of SOY, life seems to get in the way. So yeah. Here's another installment of Death's Masque. For those wondering, axiom means principle. It's meant to be somewhat ironic. I hope you enjoyed this?
Also, somewhat important note, after I publish this I'm changing my pen name to snuggalong. Starember19 has...run its course. Don't own Gundam, bros. It's been around way longer than I have.
