**Hi all, thanks for coming to take a peek at my fic. ^_^ It's the first
one I've posted on FF.net... This fic was previously posted on the Yaoi no
Hentais board under the name "Bleu". Hajimemashite, and please enjoy my
story! --Little Q**
Heero,
Yesterday you left without saying a word. I didn't know you had gone, I wasn't even expecting you to leave. I woke up shivering; maybe that should have been my first clue. I could feel the emptiness of my bed long before my eyes even dared to open. I lay there, squeezing them shut tight, clenching my fists, locking my jaw, not even allowing myself to breathe... but it is already too late. The fear has caught me, like it always does. Winding it feelers into my chest, crawling up my neck into my brain. Killing me. Every time that coldness touches me, I die a little more. I hate that feeling. I hate the fear. You know how it is.
No, you don't.
Why, Heero? Why aren't you ever afraid of anything?
...I play a little game with myself, then. I lay there for a few moments longer, tense as a bowstring, fighting myself, denying what I knew to be true. After a while, I force myself to breathe, albeit shallow and unsteady. The thin, high-pitched laugh slips past my lips before I even think twice about it.
I'd been dreaming before I woke, unlike you, the perfect soldier, who never dreams. Don't you find it odd, Heero? For a while, I even believed that you never slept, either. But then I realised it. You would always wait for slumber to take me first. Of course, it made perfect sense. You can't let your guard down, can you? Can't let anyone see you without that bloody mask. Have to remain just far enough away so that you can never be touched, never let anything mar that stunning perfection of yours. Not even me.
Right around now is where you stop listening to what I have to say. Now is when you retreat back into that sterile, impenetrable room you call your mind. Now is when I begin to read the cold wall you've erected behind your eyes, and you remain staring at me with a blank gaze. Heero, please... please don't. Please, just look away from me if you have to. That stare should be meant for those about to die, not for the one you love.
If you even do love me.
Please don't listen to me, Heero. That was unfair. I know you love me, I know it. I do know, Heero! You may not say it, but I can tell. Despite how hard you try, your mask does slip a little, sometimes. But that's alright, Heero. I won't tell anyone. You can trust me. Don't you know that? I won't give you away. I won't tell the others that I've seen you, that I know who you really are, that I've been held by you and touched by you and... loved by you. I'll keep your secret safe. Don't you believe me?
No, I guess you don't. That's why I woke up alone. Yes, that's right. I'll say it again. Alone. I shouldn't be afraid of it. It's nothing new to me. You always leave me alone. But I know it's not your fault. I know it. I know you're not purposely pushing me away, Heero.
Are you?
No! You're not! You'll be back very shortly! It's just a mission, ne? Just another blasted mission you received in the middle of the night, ne? Yes, that's right. Just a quick mission. You'll be back. Back to me. Back...
Yes. Yes. This is what I tell myself as I crawl to the edge of the bed, the edge on your side. I almost retch when my feet touch the hard, cold floor. I am dizzy, trembling, but I managed
my way to the bathroom, slumping against the far wall beside the sink. My chest is heaving with each labored breath I take, and I feel sure I will be sick. I chant it over and over in my mind. It becomes my mantra, the lifeline I cling to. He'll be back, right back. Just a mission. He'll be back.
I tried, Heero. I really did try. I wanted to be the strong Quatre, the one everybody likes, the one who makes other people happy. I wanted to make you happy, Heero. I wanted you to be proud of me.
But then I looked up at the sink, and I saw my toothbrush in the holder. Alone.
The tears start to slide, even though I had tried so very hard. They are soft at first, silent. Like you. And then, as I continue to stare at my lonely toothbrush, as my vision blurs with the tears, making the toothbrush merely a fuzzy streak of red in my sight, it seems someone has opened the proverbial flood gates. I begin sobbing violently, loudly, with vicious tremors that wrack my small body. I can't control it anymore, and I cry out in my misery. I am drowning, suffocating, dying with my need of you. I need you so!
I wrap my skinny arms around my shoulders, trying to pretend they are your muscular ones. I grip my arms, just like you do, involuntarily, when you kiss me, and I wail painfully into my sleeve. I tried to hold myself tighter, as tight as I could, as tight as you do, so that I would fall into them and away from this agony of losing you. I wanted so severely for they to be your arms, your hands, your fingers clutching me.
I scream your name when the memories start to come, roaring into my shattered thoughts, easily slipping in through the cracks. In the midst of my suffering, I remembered our first touch. Your hands in my hair, my kiss longing on your lips. I remember reaching up to your face, trying to brush away that single, hateful tear which had escaped without you knowing. But I couldn't. You wouldn't let me. You grabbed my wrist, remember? Roughly at first, and your steel azure eyes spoke volumes to mine. Oh, Heero. You can never understand what I read there, what they said to me.
Do you remember how I smiled at you, then? Remember what I told you? I looked into those eyes of yours, Heero, and I whispered, so gently... "Need me. And let me need you." That's what I said, Heero.
I thought it would take forever for those words to break through that constant barrier you keep around you. But I was mistaken, wasn't I? I suppose that single tear was a sign to me, a hidden, secret sign, there to tell me that the barricade had already come down. God, now I wonder at how livid you must have been. Imagine! You, Heero Yuy, the perfect soldier, had accidentally allowed another living being (a fellow Gundam pilot, no less!) to see you unprotected, defenseless... flawed.
But you didn't worry for long, did you, Heero? It was me, Quatre, the one who had tried so hard for your trust, your understanding. You didn't have to worry. You knew, didn't you? And you relaxed your hold on my tiny wrist, letting me slide my hungry arms around your lonely, bare shoulders. You let me comfort you, Heero. You let me hold you.
Oh Heero, surely my joy radiated off of me by then. How could you not feel it? You did feel it, though. Ne, Heero? That's why you touched me. You touched me, Heero. Your hands on my back, in my hair, between my shoulder blades. You were desperate, lost, searching. I wanted to shout at you, "I'm here! I'm your beacon, Heero! Rely on me to keep you safe!"
Of course, I didn't. I was silent, and I let you hold me, for all of those years that you never got to hold anybody. I wanted to absorb your pain into my own self, wanted you to be free of all your anguish and sorrow. I wanted you to know only love and truth and passion, where there was no such thing as "death" and "war". I wanted you to know me, Heero. I wanted you to need me.
This is why I kissed you. This is why I pulled you with me among pillows and blankets, softness and warmth. I wrapped you up with me, in my arms, in my spirit. Everything that happened, Heero... it was so right. It was you, and me, and love, and we owned it! We made it ours!
Do you remember it, Heero? The very first time we made love? You were so desperate for a way out of your grief, for someone to love you, and I was there, ready for you. I gave you all I had, my Heero. All of me. And I can't help but think you gave me the same. Even so long after, as I crouch sobbing on the bathroom floor, I can still remember you, your smell, your taste. The feel of you inside me. The beautiful, intense, exquisite pain of it, the pain that you shared with me. We sure turned that pain around, didn't we Heero? We transformed it into blinding, searing love. Into pleasure. Into desire.
I never wanted it to end, that blazing torture. You were so tender and so vicious at the same time, and I couldn't breathe, not enough. You were deep within me, making me cry out with you, but I wanted something else. I wanted your soul within me, as well.
I wanted to hear you say it.
As it built up faster, and the emotions reached the breaking point, I took the only chance I had to bind you to me. I reached up for you, pulled you down onto me, never once breaking the rhythm we had found. With trembling fingers, I smoothed your soft, unruly hair and looked into your eyes. The raw want there almost drove me over edge, but I held on just a minute longer. Long enough to murmur...
"Need me, Heero. Please. Need me."
You gasped and I felt you shudder, but not before the sweetest words came falling from your lips.
"I want you. I need you!"
It was enough for me. More than enough. We came together, perfectly, our eyes never leaving each other, our cries mingling to create the purest sound, reverberating in my entire being. I was filled with you, by you, and I was bound to you. I was yours completely. I like to believe you were mine, too.
We rode that wave together Heero, joined heart, body, and soul. We held on even after it was all finished, sighing into each others' hair, kissing each others' lips. You were without your mask; the need had created the passion to tear it away. This time, you allowed me to brush the tears from your flushed face. You allowed me to hold you as sleep welcomed me into it's own arms. You gave me over to it, nested in your warmth.
Maybe you didn't think I had heard. Maybe you wanted me to hear. It's hard to tell that, now. The fact of the matter is, I did hear, Heero. I heard what you whispered to me on the edge of my dream, that bridge between slumber and wakefulness.
"I need you so badly.... My Little Quatre."
I think I was asleep not half a second after you uttered it.
But I heard, Heero. And I can never allow you to take it back.
So why are you trying to? Why? Why do you leave me the way you do? Even at night, when the two of us are in my bed, entwined and joined, still you are not there. My mind tries to play tricks on me and tell me that you were never there, but I push it away, until the next time. I close my eyes tightly and concentrate on nothing but you, and this bond between us. I force my thoughts not to drift from you and your intensity, from the feeling of you buried inside me. But Heero, my Heero, although you are there, you are becoming so farther and farther away.
Which is why, when I wake and you are not beside me, the fear comes. The terror that one day, you will realise that you don't need me at all, and that you never did. Not even for a small bit of release. The terror says that I am nothing, that I am worthless, and I've done to you exactly what I did to my father. It tells me that I've needed you, driven you away, and killed you. I've lost you.
Every time you leave, you rip yourself further out of me.
But, Heero, this endless need still lives on within me. The need to be beside you, part of you. In love with you. So, where does that leave me?
Gasping through tears on the bathroom floor. Ripping at my hair with my fingers. Shaking my head to the memories. Aching in desperate need of you.
I scramble to my knees, falling down once but somehow making it. I throw up in the sink, trembling and weak from fever. Is it my imagination that causes me to lose my control like this? It wouldn't be the first time. It's what led me to believe in you, ne?
The tears slow again, and I'm choking on them, trying to catch my breath, trying not to become too hysterical. I let my swollen eyes drift, and they alight on the empty places where things of yours would have been. Your shoes. Your jacket. Your laptop.
Then I spot the culprit. My stupid little toothbrush! I started to laugh again, that high-pitched giggle, the one that only breaks free on rare occasions. The one that comes each morning that I wake up and find you gone. The one that came when I watched my father die. The one that comes every time I fail.
I turn red, raw eyes to the mirror, and to this failure looking back at me. I scoff at it, scorn it's shameful face. "What the hell are you crying for?" So many people would be disappointed in me. So many others have faith in me, believe in me, trust me. But it's not enough. It will never be enough, because the one person I want to trust me more than anything can't. He won't.
Don't you have any idea how that hurts, Heero? No! You don't!! Because you don't feel pain! That damned shell you live in can't feel anything like pain or love or hurt or sorrow! That'd be too imperfect for you. And you have to be perfect. have to perfectly, methodically, and without question kill everything that gets in the way of your god damned mission! And, of course, this includes lovers. Kill them, too. Maybe not physically, but emotionally. Mentally.
It's you who sends the fear, I've figured it out. What is it, Heero? A warning? maybe you're hoping that I'll use it as a gauge, a meter, so that whenever you come back, I'll still carry it and keep my distance of you. Maybe you're wishing that I'd get the picture already and leave on my own, so that when you get back, I'll not be here.
Heero? It's working, my Heero.
Which is why I'm here, on this plane now, leaving you behind, although you're not really there at all. Were you ever?
I'm afraid, Heero. So very afraid. Afraid for you , afraid for me. Afraid you'll be happy to be by yourself once more, without anyone needing you, and without need of anyone. Alone.
But don't you see? That's the very same thing I fear for myself.
But it's alright, Heero. It'll be okay. Because you forget, I'm a Gundam pilot, too. I'll put on the front just like you do, like we all do, in order to make it through and succeed in my mission. Ninmu ryoukai, Heero.
Mission accepted.
-------
Heero,
Yesterday you left without saying a word. I didn't know you had gone, I wasn't even expecting you to leave. I woke up shivering; maybe that should have been my first clue. I could feel the emptiness of my bed long before my eyes even dared to open. I lay there, squeezing them shut tight, clenching my fists, locking my jaw, not even allowing myself to breathe... but it is already too late. The fear has caught me, like it always does. Winding it feelers into my chest, crawling up my neck into my brain. Killing me. Every time that coldness touches me, I die a little more. I hate that feeling. I hate the fear. You know how it is.
No, you don't.
Why, Heero? Why aren't you ever afraid of anything?
...I play a little game with myself, then. I lay there for a few moments longer, tense as a bowstring, fighting myself, denying what I knew to be true. After a while, I force myself to breathe, albeit shallow and unsteady. The thin, high-pitched laugh slips past my lips before I even think twice about it.
I'd been dreaming before I woke, unlike you, the perfect soldier, who never dreams. Don't you find it odd, Heero? For a while, I even believed that you never slept, either. But then I realised it. You would always wait for slumber to take me first. Of course, it made perfect sense. You can't let your guard down, can you? Can't let anyone see you without that bloody mask. Have to remain just far enough away so that you can never be touched, never let anything mar that stunning perfection of yours. Not even me.
Right around now is where you stop listening to what I have to say. Now is when you retreat back into that sterile, impenetrable room you call your mind. Now is when I begin to read the cold wall you've erected behind your eyes, and you remain staring at me with a blank gaze. Heero, please... please don't. Please, just look away from me if you have to. That stare should be meant for those about to die, not for the one you love.
If you even do love me.
Please don't listen to me, Heero. That was unfair. I know you love me, I know it. I do know, Heero! You may not say it, but I can tell. Despite how hard you try, your mask does slip a little, sometimes. But that's alright, Heero. I won't tell anyone. You can trust me. Don't you know that? I won't give you away. I won't tell the others that I've seen you, that I know who you really are, that I've been held by you and touched by you and... loved by you. I'll keep your secret safe. Don't you believe me?
No, I guess you don't. That's why I woke up alone. Yes, that's right. I'll say it again. Alone. I shouldn't be afraid of it. It's nothing new to me. You always leave me alone. But I know it's not your fault. I know it. I know you're not purposely pushing me away, Heero.
Are you?
No! You're not! You'll be back very shortly! It's just a mission, ne? Just another blasted mission you received in the middle of the night, ne? Yes, that's right. Just a quick mission. You'll be back. Back to me. Back...
Yes. Yes. This is what I tell myself as I crawl to the edge of the bed, the edge on your side. I almost retch when my feet touch the hard, cold floor. I am dizzy, trembling, but I managed
my way to the bathroom, slumping against the far wall beside the sink. My chest is heaving with each labored breath I take, and I feel sure I will be sick. I chant it over and over in my mind. It becomes my mantra, the lifeline I cling to. He'll be back, right back. Just a mission. He'll be back.
I tried, Heero. I really did try. I wanted to be the strong Quatre, the one everybody likes, the one who makes other people happy. I wanted to make you happy, Heero. I wanted you to be proud of me.
But then I looked up at the sink, and I saw my toothbrush in the holder. Alone.
The tears start to slide, even though I had tried so very hard. They are soft at first, silent. Like you. And then, as I continue to stare at my lonely toothbrush, as my vision blurs with the tears, making the toothbrush merely a fuzzy streak of red in my sight, it seems someone has opened the proverbial flood gates. I begin sobbing violently, loudly, with vicious tremors that wrack my small body. I can't control it anymore, and I cry out in my misery. I am drowning, suffocating, dying with my need of you. I need you so!
I wrap my skinny arms around my shoulders, trying to pretend they are your muscular ones. I grip my arms, just like you do, involuntarily, when you kiss me, and I wail painfully into my sleeve. I tried to hold myself tighter, as tight as I could, as tight as you do, so that I would fall into them and away from this agony of losing you. I wanted so severely for they to be your arms, your hands, your fingers clutching me.
I scream your name when the memories start to come, roaring into my shattered thoughts, easily slipping in through the cracks. In the midst of my suffering, I remembered our first touch. Your hands in my hair, my kiss longing on your lips. I remember reaching up to your face, trying to brush away that single, hateful tear which had escaped without you knowing. But I couldn't. You wouldn't let me. You grabbed my wrist, remember? Roughly at first, and your steel azure eyes spoke volumes to mine. Oh, Heero. You can never understand what I read there, what they said to me.
Do you remember how I smiled at you, then? Remember what I told you? I looked into those eyes of yours, Heero, and I whispered, so gently... "Need me. And let me need you." That's what I said, Heero.
I thought it would take forever for those words to break through that constant barrier you keep around you. But I was mistaken, wasn't I? I suppose that single tear was a sign to me, a hidden, secret sign, there to tell me that the barricade had already come down. God, now I wonder at how livid you must have been. Imagine! You, Heero Yuy, the perfect soldier, had accidentally allowed another living being (a fellow Gundam pilot, no less!) to see you unprotected, defenseless... flawed.
But you didn't worry for long, did you, Heero? It was me, Quatre, the one who had tried so hard for your trust, your understanding. You didn't have to worry. You knew, didn't you? And you relaxed your hold on my tiny wrist, letting me slide my hungry arms around your lonely, bare shoulders. You let me comfort you, Heero. You let me hold you.
Oh Heero, surely my joy radiated off of me by then. How could you not feel it? You did feel it, though. Ne, Heero? That's why you touched me. You touched me, Heero. Your hands on my back, in my hair, between my shoulder blades. You were desperate, lost, searching. I wanted to shout at you, "I'm here! I'm your beacon, Heero! Rely on me to keep you safe!"
Of course, I didn't. I was silent, and I let you hold me, for all of those years that you never got to hold anybody. I wanted to absorb your pain into my own self, wanted you to be free of all your anguish and sorrow. I wanted you to know only love and truth and passion, where there was no such thing as "death" and "war". I wanted you to know me, Heero. I wanted you to need me.
This is why I kissed you. This is why I pulled you with me among pillows and blankets, softness and warmth. I wrapped you up with me, in my arms, in my spirit. Everything that happened, Heero... it was so right. It was you, and me, and love, and we owned it! We made it ours!
Do you remember it, Heero? The very first time we made love? You were so desperate for a way out of your grief, for someone to love you, and I was there, ready for you. I gave you all I had, my Heero. All of me. And I can't help but think you gave me the same. Even so long after, as I crouch sobbing on the bathroom floor, I can still remember you, your smell, your taste. The feel of you inside me. The beautiful, intense, exquisite pain of it, the pain that you shared with me. We sure turned that pain around, didn't we Heero? We transformed it into blinding, searing love. Into pleasure. Into desire.
I never wanted it to end, that blazing torture. You were so tender and so vicious at the same time, and I couldn't breathe, not enough. You were deep within me, making me cry out with you, but I wanted something else. I wanted your soul within me, as well.
I wanted to hear you say it.
As it built up faster, and the emotions reached the breaking point, I took the only chance I had to bind you to me. I reached up for you, pulled you down onto me, never once breaking the rhythm we had found. With trembling fingers, I smoothed your soft, unruly hair and looked into your eyes. The raw want there almost drove me over edge, but I held on just a minute longer. Long enough to murmur...
"Need me, Heero. Please. Need me."
You gasped and I felt you shudder, but not before the sweetest words came falling from your lips.
"I want you. I need you!"
It was enough for me. More than enough. We came together, perfectly, our eyes never leaving each other, our cries mingling to create the purest sound, reverberating in my entire being. I was filled with you, by you, and I was bound to you. I was yours completely. I like to believe you were mine, too.
We rode that wave together Heero, joined heart, body, and soul. We held on even after it was all finished, sighing into each others' hair, kissing each others' lips. You were without your mask; the need had created the passion to tear it away. This time, you allowed me to brush the tears from your flushed face. You allowed me to hold you as sleep welcomed me into it's own arms. You gave me over to it, nested in your warmth.
Maybe you didn't think I had heard. Maybe you wanted me to hear. It's hard to tell that, now. The fact of the matter is, I did hear, Heero. I heard what you whispered to me on the edge of my dream, that bridge between slumber and wakefulness.
"I need you so badly.... My Little Quatre."
I think I was asleep not half a second after you uttered it.
But I heard, Heero. And I can never allow you to take it back.
So why are you trying to? Why? Why do you leave me the way you do? Even at night, when the two of us are in my bed, entwined and joined, still you are not there. My mind tries to play tricks on me and tell me that you were never there, but I push it away, until the next time. I close my eyes tightly and concentrate on nothing but you, and this bond between us. I force my thoughts not to drift from you and your intensity, from the feeling of you buried inside me. But Heero, my Heero, although you are there, you are becoming so farther and farther away.
Which is why, when I wake and you are not beside me, the fear comes. The terror that one day, you will realise that you don't need me at all, and that you never did. Not even for a small bit of release. The terror says that I am nothing, that I am worthless, and I've done to you exactly what I did to my father. It tells me that I've needed you, driven you away, and killed you. I've lost you.
Every time you leave, you rip yourself further out of me.
But, Heero, this endless need still lives on within me. The need to be beside you, part of you. In love with you. So, where does that leave me?
Gasping through tears on the bathroom floor. Ripping at my hair with my fingers. Shaking my head to the memories. Aching in desperate need of you.
I scramble to my knees, falling down once but somehow making it. I throw up in the sink, trembling and weak from fever. Is it my imagination that causes me to lose my control like this? It wouldn't be the first time. It's what led me to believe in you, ne?
The tears slow again, and I'm choking on them, trying to catch my breath, trying not to become too hysterical. I let my swollen eyes drift, and they alight on the empty places where things of yours would have been. Your shoes. Your jacket. Your laptop.
Then I spot the culprit. My stupid little toothbrush! I started to laugh again, that high-pitched giggle, the one that only breaks free on rare occasions. The one that comes each morning that I wake up and find you gone. The one that came when I watched my father die. The one that comes every time I fail.
I turn red, raw eyes to the mirror, and to this failure looking back at me. I scoff at it, scorn it's shameful face. "What the hell are you crying for?" So many people would be disappointed in me. So many others have faith in me, believe in me, trust me. But it's not enough. It will never be enough, because the one person I want to trust me more than anything can't. He won't.
Don't you have any idea how that hurts, Heero? No! You don't!! Because you don't feel pain! That damned shell you live in can't feel anything like pain or love or hurt or sorrow! That'd be too imperfect for you. And you have to be perfect. have to perfectly, methodically, and without question kill everything that gets in the way of your god damned mission! And, of course, this includes lovers. Kill them, too. Maybe not physically, but emotionally. Mentally.
It's you who sends the fear, I've figured it out. What is it, Heero? A warning? maybe you're hoping that I'll use it as a gauge, a meter, so that whenever you come back, I'll still carry it and keep my distance of you. Maybe you're wishing that I'd get the picture already and leave on my own, so that when you get back, I'll not be here.
Heero? It's working, my Heero.
Which is why I'm here, on this plane now, leaving you behind, although you're not really there at all. Were you ever?
I'm afraid, Heero. So very afraid. Afraid for you , afraid for me. Afraid you'll be happy to be by yourself once more, without anyone needing you, and without need of anyone. Alone.
But don't you see? That's the very same thing I fear for myself.
But it's alright, Heero. It'll be okay. Because you forget, I'm a Gundam pilot, too. I'll put on the front just like you do, like we all do, in order to make it through and succeed in my mission. Ninmu ryoukai, Heero.
Mission accepted.
-------