Adapting
Sometimes, when Heero thought back to his fifteen year old self, the disjointment between that reality and the now was so strong that he wondered how the same person could live such very different lives.
Fifteen year old Heero would never have contemplated nor entertained the idea that one day he would hold the mutual affections of a woman, let alone an Earthling and one as prolific as Relena Darlian. Yet, this morning he had awoken in their bed, made coffee on their machine, and drove her to work in…well his car, but that was beside the point. It was an aspect of his life he never expected and never wanted until he had it, and he guarded it fiercely.
But the other aspect of his new life took him by equal measures of surprise. It had crept up on him, much like that time he'd woken up one day and realised the flesh of his ankles were showing from under his jeans, and realised that somehow he had acquired a group of friends. He knew he'd be sexually attracted to women, and extending that romantically wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. But being close enough to other men that he would trust them with that which was most important to him, the success of his missions, his past, his life and the safety of the woman he loved…was something that seemed so impossible seven years ago that his teenage self would have shot a guy down for the suggestion.
They had slowly, but by no means smoothly, transitioned themselves into his life, settling into a permanent place of respect, loyalty and affection that he secretly treasured.
Duo planted the first seed into the cracks of his otherwise impenetrable wall. From the beginning, the man was a complete anomaly. He found it difficult to understand how a pilot clearly trained for the same mission as he could be so fundamentally different. His outlook, his demeanour, his lack of seriousness for the mission at hand…but with time he realised that those things were superficial and so well-crafted that they could only be intentional. He saw in Duo Maxwell for the first time in his life a mirror reflection of his own consciousness; it just wore a different face. He would never admit it, but seeing that same face nearly every day lit up, animated, content and a far cry from the painted mask he'd worn when they'd met gave Heero hope that his own life could follow suit. It did.
From the outside looking in, people found it a wonder that Heero would tolerate the braided man in his life. He was loud, but Heero found that the way he spoke what everybody else was thinking was a convenient relief for the more stoic of the group. He gave them a voice and it was, in a way, empowering.
Duo had a habit of meddling where he had no right to. Heero suspected on some level he took a measure of joy from the bedlam but he knew, fundamentally, that his heart was always in the right place. Duo had an insatiable need to control the things around him, a by-product of a lifetime of losing what was important to him and being completely powerless to stop it. So, the rest of them let him meddle as far as they were comfortable. He owed a series of unsuccessful attempts on Relena's affections to such meddling, and one coveted success.
Then, came Trowa.
Heero's camaraderie with Trowa developed almost instantly. They were very similar in temperament, though Heero's occasional hot-headedness was a feature distinctly missing from Trowa's emotional repertoire. He could talk comfortably with the quiet man, as oxymoronic as that sounded, but their silences were equally as comfortable. He felt no need to be anything other than he was.
Trowa's past, he had learned, was frighteningly similar to his own. No name, no family, and raised to do no more than follow orders at the sacrifice of their emotional health. Heero had a harder time than Trowa in that department, choosing to live by his father's words outside of battle in an act of defiance against those who manipulated him.
Trowa would give Heero the clarity and focus he needed to move on from his mistakes, and he made many. He was at first a terrible boyfriend, and he had upset Relena more than he cared to remember. But Trowa was there to remind him of what was important, and it was not his pride, to remind him that he didn't need to keep a constant vigil over his emotions, for risk of locking her out. His advice was practical, thought out and he had no qualms about pointing out his flaws, and Heero would take it because it was so reliably dispassionately unbiased. Such instances were fewer these days, but he was always there to snap him back into place when he bent out of line.
Trowa would also steal his coffee, his clothes and his weapons. Heero suspected he would be paying Trowa back for his use of the Heavyarms for the rest of his life. He was fine with that.
Quatre's insertion into his life came as an enemy before much else. Before that time, he had merely been the pilot of a machine remarkably similar to his with the same mission. But hearing Trowa talk about him with admiration and respect, and something else he now knew to be affection, had somewhat warmed him to the blond before Quatre's overwhelming kindness had made its appearance.
Quatre was their emotional counterweight. He didn't have the almost ruinous childhoods they'd experienced early on; it did, however, make it far too easy to become unhinged when ruin eventually caught up with him. The Zero system didn't ruin people; people ruined people, and Quatre had been brutalised in a way only that was only possible for one as kind as he. Heero had long been under the belief that people like Quatre had no place in war, other than as a victim. He was wrong, and he soon realised that leaders were made of men like Quatre, women like Relena.
Quatre took Heero on a journey of self-exploration that would have been unbearably hard without him. It was Quatre that affirmed to him the meaning of his father's advice; live by your emotions. He'd applied that advice without really seeing the end goal, another order he was blindly following without rhyme or reason. Quatre taught him that there was no end goal, that the goal in itself was to be true to yourself and to never regret your actions. He followed his gut to the Sank Kingdom and found, through his loss of purpose and sense of self, somewhere he felt secure in placing his hopes. He stood on the gallery of Romerfeller's address hall, a gun aimed at her head, and for all the sense her death made he trusted another instinct he hadn't thought to before, an instinct that told him that if he let her live, he would never regret it. He owed Quatre more than he could ever repay.
Quatre, as a friend, could be a little overbearing. He had an unyielding guilty conscience; Duo had nailed it when he said Quatre would blame himself for the lack of air in space. As a result, he could be quite pushy. In a way, that's what made him a good leader. Everybody gets so caught up in his flow that they can't help but be dragged along. In a way, it put them back to old comforts; people like him needed orders, whether they liked it or not, parameters in which to live by. Quatre did that for them without even trying, probably completely unconscious of it.
It was Quatre that first suggested to him that his feelings for Relena had morphed into something foreign, something more adult that those he'd had as a teen. He knew feelings could change, but he was unprepared for the severity of it. He began noticing small things that shouldn't matter, like the way she wrapped her lips around her pen when she wanted to avoid speaking, the scent of vanilla in her perfume, or the way her skirt rose up her thigh when she cross her slender legs, or the way she had legs. He wanted to be around her more and more, pining in a way that he knew was borderline pathetic, and feeling irrationally hostile when those of his sex with an obvious agenda that was distinctly less than professional approached her.
It was the latter that found him licking his wounds after a verbal chewing out on her part, having subjected her latest pursuer to an almost vitriolic interrogation…a pursuer that turned out to be a very married Space Trade Minister. It was like he was watching it from outside of his own body, through a window, knowing in his head that it made no sense and yet his body and mouth kept acting on their own accord anyway. He felt lost…until Quatre sat down in front of him, smile of all-encompassing knowledge and sympathy on his ever-bright face, and said four words that turned his world right-way up.
"I'm in love, too."
Wufei…was a special case. They had been antagonistic towards each other frequently during the wars and not much had changed since then other than the fact that they were, at least, both playing for the same side. What they fought over had morphed from ideology into every day decisions, such as whether they should use projectile or static explosives to destroy a mobile suit containment bunker (Heero still maintained that the accuracy of static explosives would match the strength of a missile impact).
Their constant rivalry was one born of two factors, one being that they had personalities that were doomed to clash. Once Wufei had his mind made up about something, only he could change it, come hell or high water. If somebody else tried to stick their oar in, he would stick to his guns on principle, and then he'd become impossible. Heero, on the other hand, lacked patience and because he had come to expect Wufei's hard-headedness, his ascent into the offensive was almost instantaneous regardless of the subject matter. Were it not for the peacekeepers in their rag-tag clan, Heero is certain they would have come to blows...well, more than they would have without them, anyway.
The second was that Wufei was, in his essence, every bit the warrior Heero was and with all the pride that came with it. Heero didn't have the strict traditional style of martial training that had been passed on to Wufei through his infamous clan, but he had worked just as hard and took just as much pride in his accomplishments. Heero's fighting style was a bastardisation of three very different approaches to combat that encompassed everything he needed and suited his physical strengths, and Wufei found it evidently distasteful, like he'd personally muddied something much higher than himself. This inevitably led to the never-ending desire to pitch one against the other, and the line between a test-match and an all-out brawl was very blurred.
Still…Wufei was his friend, in every way the others were. Wufei was a phenomenal fighter, and for all their bickering, he respected Wufei for his integrity, his ability to follow through with his convictions through adversity and against any enemy. Wufei shared a passion for learning, an academic streak, that none of the others enjoyed beyond what was necessary. When he was alone, he always had his head stuck in a book and he had found out that, before being chosen to pilot the Shenlong Gundam, Wufei had grown up a prodigal scholar. And that was where they bonded.
Every so often, Wufei would come wordlessly into his office and place a tome of some size and variety on the corner of his desk and leave. His reading suggestions were always on the mark and once Heero had digested it for its encyclopedic goodness, he would walk across the hall to the Chinese pilot's own office…and talk. It was always in the way of a debate, but not in any way antagonistic. This was two people bouncing off of each other the contents of their minds in the context of a greater everything. It kept him intellectually stimulated and that made him happy.
Relena and Wufei, much to everyone's shock, got along like a house on fire. It made sense in a way. They were both incredibly stubborn about their beliefs and both respected people who could do the same. At first, Heero thought to create a distance between the two, who hold very different viewpoints on the philosophical spectrum, not least because Wufei was unapologetically biased against women for their perceived weakness. He then realised that Relena neither wanted nor needed his protection, as was evident by the way Wufei's remarks were matched blow for blow by her own, creating a field of banter he knew he would have to stay well clear of. Relena became another Sally Po in Wufei's life, a woman he saw as equal and it was a rare position she didn't take lightly.
And so would start their mornings. Heero sat down at his desk, picking up the latest volume for the two-man book club, putting down his coffee to flick through it, a mistake he realised too late as Trowa swooped down on him, death from above, to relieve him of the steaming beverage. Relena's morning welcome popped up in his inbox, filling him in on the details of her conference on L4 (and exactly which highly enjoyable activities he was missing out on in her hotel suite) with greetings from Quatre… and Duo was there, looking over his shoulder and prodding him to read it out loud.
He never expected to make friends, but he was more than willing to adapt.
So, the only thing I love as much as 1xR is the bromance between these guys and a lot of my headcanons focus on their daily shenanigans at Preventer HQ. SoI wrote some of said headcanons in prose. I hope you enjoyed and it's not terribly out of character. Because this will for the basis of a short series I'll be writing in a few weeks.