Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing
"Traitor."
She looked at herself in the mirror, again, with a frown.
"You agreed to protect me," Relena said. "You gave me your word! 'One hundred percent,' you said. 'Guaranteed,' you said."
She drew her hand to massage away the knitting of her brow muscles, but the touch only agitated the injury, so she was forced to readjust. Instead, she applied pressure to the inside of the brow bone, following the crease of her lid until the pain slowly became too much too bear. The indirect approach was not nearly as effective, but at least it offered some relief to the building stress. Blinking through her now smeared eyeliner, Relena huffed at her appearance.
"Now what? I'm ruined. And you know what I mean. This is beyond the mess of makeup and sweat I've got going on right now. This is bigger than that. The things they're going to say." Anxiety started crawling up her neck at the thought.
"There is nothing that can hide an injury like this! I'm humiliated, and I haven't even been seen, yet. You know they take pictures of me, right? Everywhere. Meetings. Traveling. Fundraisers. The freaking conference this Saturday!"
Relena focused on her breath, trying to calm her attitude by stilling and slowing her diaphragm. It only worked so long as she kept her eyes shut, but she absorbed the rest of the moment in peace.
"'Well, at least your eyes work,'" she sniveled and scoffed, twisting her lip and bobbling her head in a very childlike manner. "'You can still see. No blindness for you.' I think I'd almost rather be blind. At least then I wouldn't have to see myself!" She knew the comment was unnecessarily disrespectful to a fair chunk of the disabled community, but she was so emotional, she tried not to care.
"You're a total let down. You're an absolute failure. You're a humiliation!" If someone had wandered into her room by chance, they might wonder if she was talking to herself derogatorily the way she focused her rage on the looking glass.
To be honest, she wondered the same.
Relena shook her head and carefully examined the tender incarnadine skin and the stark white circles that outlined her eyes. Suddenly, that milky white tone the fashion magazines were simultaneously praising and passive-aggressively criticizing the week before was staring back, mocking her for not standing up to the 'book by the cover' mentality. She was also faced with the reality that she was still fighting the uphill battle of letting go of the bondage to appearance, too.
"I look like an inverse panda!"
Relena reached out and grabbed the designer sunglasses from her vanity, tossing them across the room with a mighty heave.
"One hundred percent UV protection my rear end!"
A/N: Thank you, Stormy, for the beta. ^_^