In the infant hours of morning, when the sun peeks just so through the half-shaded windows, when the crisp pre-dawn wind sweeps the gauzy curtains aside, Duo Maxwell stirs. It's the same every day. The soft chime of birds through the cracked-open window, the first kiss of sunrise gilding his tangled mane of hair. He reaches out, fingers brushing the familiar, love-tattered fabric, and he eases toward it, breathing in the achingly familiar scent of steel and gunsmoke. The faintest smile touches his lips, and he curls his fingers through the smooth-worn hole in the side of the tank top, caressing the sleepy heat of the blankets.
"Good morning, handsome," he murmurs, the raspiness of midnight creaking into the empty room.
And then, as the alarm on the bedside table begins its angry yowl, Duo Maxwell wakes up alone. The curl remains on his lips as he lifts the scrap of olive drab fabric to his face, burying his nose in the more-holes-than-clothes tank top and inhaling deeply. Though it's been half a dozen years, Heero's scent still clings to the abandoned textile.
It's been six years. He can't believe it, sometimes. Six years since Heero shrugged out of the green tanktop he wore while piloting Wing Zero, the one that remained in service despite the myriad of tears and rips across its surface. Six years since he dropped that shirt carelessly on the bed, kissed Duo in that intoxicating fashion that made his skin tingle straight to the bone, and tugged on his regulation jacket as he walked out the door to work.
Six years since a polite cough drew Duo Maxwell from beneath the chassis of a battered ancient Jeep, rolling away from its belly to reveal a uniformed, solemn-faced man. Six years since his world fell apart with the words, "I'm sorry, Sir, but I have some bad news…" Six years since Heero became his namesake, taking a bullet for the former Queen of the World, measuring his length on the steps of Parliament in order to save the Princess they always knew he would give his life for.
And Duo isn't bitter – doesn't for a second begrudge Relena Peacecraft her life. She is a brilliant woman, has made vast strides toward improving the quality of life for so many different people. She's even, perhaps in a fit of guilty conscience, supported a measure that will clean up the slums and back alleys of L2, giving thousands of orphaned and uneducated children a second chance.
Then again, she knows who Heero left behind when that bullet exited beside his spine with a slow-motion spray of blood. And it wasn't her. It wasn't her name bubbling onto his lips with the crimson froth of his last breath. It wasn't her face that sprang to his eyes as those beautiful ocean blues clouded over, gazing so far beyond her that she no longer existed. She held his hand, kneeling by his side, the graceful royalty with her faithful knight. Duo has seen the tapes. He doesn't begrudge her that right, either, the ability to be by the love of his life as Heero died.
He couldn't be there, and he never would have asked Heero to die alone.
He thanked her, at the funeral, for being there. For giving Heero the chance to leave this world in the arms of someone who loved him. She was surprised, her baby blues widening with incomprehension. They hadn't been the closest of friends, before Heero left this earth behind. Something about the strings crossed between them that neither one of them knew how to sever. Heero cut them in one fell swoop, falling across them like downed trees on an electric wire. They both loved him. And he, in his own way, had loved them back.
Relena, perhaps not in the way she dreamed. But she wished them well – had always wished them well. She saw how happy they were together, the brightness in Heero's eyes when he announced their upcoming marriage. Duo rubs at the gundanium band around his finger, still in its place. Part of Deathscythe's hull, scavenged from the rubble before the Gundams were sent into the sun. Heero's would have been crafted from Wing, had he lived long enough to wear it.
He'd slid it onto his lover's finger, cold and rigid, for the first and last time. Felt the tears choking their way out of his throat as he stuttered his way through his goodbye, sobbed the wedding vows into Heero's uniformed chest. They'd insisted that Heero be buried in his uniform, as he put so much pride in his work. As he'd died for his work. Duo would just as soon have seen him in a pair of snug black shorts, a ratty green tank top, and a pair of hideous, mustard colored boots. Or a flightsuit, half-unzipped, to remind him of too many sweat-slicked encounters in Wing's cockpit.
Maybe that was a bit sacreligious. He shouldn't, couldn't, ruin other people's illusions of Heero Yuy. They knew him as the Perfect Soldier, the only one who could stand toe to toe with the ZERO system and emerge intact. They knew him as the Savior of the World, the one who destroyed the renegade section of Libra that would have created an endless winter, the end of life on earth. They knew him as Relena's shadow, the Captain of her personal guard, responsible for more thwarted assassination attempts than the public would ever be aware of.
They never knew Duo's Heero, the Heero of breathless midnights, squirming beneath superheated blankets as moans echoed off the walls. The Heero who would wake him from nightmares with a heart-breakingly gentle kiss, leaving the bedside light turned on so he could drift back to sleep in safety. They never saw Heero slide into the kitchen wearing only his socks, play target practice with frozen waffles and the toaster.
They never… Duo swallows down a sob as the familiar dampness spikes his eyelashes. Fuck. Six years, and thinking about his lost partner still causes grief to spike through him like a misaimed bullet. He wonders if it will ever stop. People try to tell him that the agony fades, that cotton wraps around the wound and gradually swaddles it in the passage of time. It's been over half a decade, and the memory of Heero's touch still sends skitters of pleasure-pain across his skin. He doesn't make any efforts to avoid the stabs of memory, though nostalgia slays him like a wrecking ball to the gut.
He loved Heero. Loved him with every last ounce of humanity flowing through his veins. Loved him with a fierceness reserved for his Gundam, the adrenaline of battle, and the residents of the former Maxwell Church. He thought he'd never be able to let his guard down, never be able to feel anything but abject hatred for another human being. Heero disarmed him, effortlessly, fitting into his life with the ease of a well-oiled gear sliding into place.
If only Duo had joined Preventer beside his partner, kept on fighting the battle that they all foolishly believed would end on Peacemillion. It never ended. There were always assholes with grudges out there, always bastards who grasped at more power than they had a right to hold. There were always snipers with clever aim and impossible connections, lying on rooftops to shoot the pretty, blonde-haired heir to the Sanc Kingdom.
There was always going to fucking be a reason to fight. And gods, if Duo wasn't tired of it. Tired of people dying in a spray of metal and gunpowder. Tired of blood dripping off of his hands, only some of it his. He just… he just wanted to be a mechanic, ya know? Spend his days covered in grease and oil, balls deep in the engine of some stunning little hotrod. Be paid a ludicrous amount of money for what he considered to be a hobby.
But maybe he should have stayed by Heero's side, where he belonged. Maybe then Heero would still be waking up beside him, sleep-mussed and smiling, brushing a kiss over his tangled bangs. Maybe he would have seen the glint from that sniper's scope, been able to push Heero out of the way of that lethal bullet. Maybe if there had been two of them, it would have been alright. Maybe he could have died instead.
And that's what it all came down to, isn't it? Heero was supposed to be the one who defeated death. Surviving their first meeting, when Duo had shot him twice. Surviving jumping from a cliff with no parachute. Surviving a self-destruct. Surviving the ZERO system. He was supposed to be the modern day Harry Potter, the boy who lived. He was supposed to outlive Duo, still performing impossible feats from his wheelchair when he was a hundred and three or some crazy shit.
It was supposed to be the other way around. Duo, the plague-ridden L2 orphan, small due to malnourishment, death's bride, courting the grim reaper from the second he lost his chosen family… he was supposed to die. Supposed to greet death like an old friend, arms wide open, accepting his consequence and his damnation. Murderers don't go to heaven, and his hands were far from clean. But that was his right – he chose this path, he chose his Gundam, and he chose Heero.
And Heero wasn't – Heero wasn't supposed to leave him like this! He thought, with the war over, with Operation Meteor a blip in the past, that they would be granted the chance of peace. Not of world peace, but of peace with each other. With themselves. Sleepy Sunday mornings, smiley face pancakes, a real honeymoon to Paris or Rome or one of those other romantic as fuck locations. Duo thought they'd have at least one wish come true – the wish to be normal, to be allowed to lead lives empty of torture and blood.
In his wildest nightmares, Duo never imagined this. Sinking to his knees on the damp earth, the bite of rocks clipping the skin over his kneecaps. Gently, so gently, laying a handful of sunflowers across the shimmering granite slab, the one carved with entirely too few words. I loved you then, I love you still, I always have, I always will.
People had objected to the memorial, feebly protesting the sentiment, something about 'it just wasn't Heero', until he silenced them, tears of rage and sorrow streaking down his face, violet eyes too-large as he shoved a card into their faces. A card, in Heero's own hand-writing, written the night he'd proposed. As a reminder, he joked, in case Duo ever forgot about it.
As if Duo could ever forget about him, or the look in those sky-at-dusk eyes when he said 'I love you' for the first time. Duo hadn't been with another person since Heero passed, and he didn't reckon he ever would be. Heero was his end game, his everything. It's hard to move on when his one and only lover was the darling of the Eve War, the one who shook him down to the marrow of his bones. He had no need, no want to fill the aching void in his chest. It was Heero, Heero's name that echoed in his heart, Heero's breath that slipped soundless through his lungs.
It was always Heero. And, even now, when his fingers slipping across that name on the grave feels like a sucker punch to the gut, it still is.