Title: Crafts

Author: Miss Murdered & ELLE

Pairings/Warnings: 1x2x1 and 4xR, m/m sex, light angst, sap, bad language

Notes: This one is for Daphie for encouraging a notion of Miss M's on Valentine's Day that ELLE saw all too easily. ;-P

Heero

There are certain things you hear over and over again in therapy that are nearly impossible to actually apply to your daily life. For me, one of those things is to immerse myself in ordinary moments. When over half your life consisted of tense, high-risk situations that require an incredible amount of concentration on multiple data points in order to make quick decisions that could easily be life or death – well, downtime and the everyday monotony of simply living seemed somehow more difficult than battlefield negotiation. It was impossible not to focus on the extraneous details that most people habitually filter out – sometimes just walking down the street to the corner store was an exercise in madness. It was a constant calculation of every single person's threat level, where said threat might come from, how I was possibly going to respond without a weapon, shielding, or a team. There were plenty of times I just didn't feel up to it and stayed locked in the house for days. To be frank, sometimes downtime was torture.

And unfortunately I had a lot of downtime since re-enrolling in therapy. It was okay. I understood why Une made the decision to draw me back into tactics and training, presumably so I could spend more time focusing on myself without the stress of missions. And while having Duo sent off without me only added to my stress load, letting go of my intense need of the constant reassurance of his existence was what I was supposed to be working on. But I didn't have to like it – and I didn't. I wished I knew how he dealt with it. There were a lot of things I envied about him.

"Uncle 'Ro?"

I blinked and turned to look over at the little girl next to me, seeming entirely too small in Duo's over-sized office chair. Her bleach blond pigtails, ruddy cheeks, fair skin, and incredibly fine linen dress replete with ruffles and eyelets and little bows betrayed her heritage as one of Quatre and Relena's offspring.

"You are 'posed to make a picture."

I grunted a non-committal response and looked back at the plain blue piece of construction paper under my hands. The entire desk was covered in it, as well as safety scissors, glue, glitter, and markers. I didn't even know these things existed, really, outside of children's television shows I might've caught brief glimpses of in shitty hotel rooms with a plethora of skinemax channels to choose from until Duo came home with a bag of this stuff. Suffice to say I had never 'made a picture' of anything – at least not like this. Though once I did have a little notepad with blue lines Odin had given me where I sketched out interesting cars I had seen or copied technical diagrams of guns from manuals, it was inevitably lost and he never got me another one.

Then I looked back over at her collection – filled with flowers, animals, and crude depictions of ladies in what appeared to be expensive gowns – and felt perplexed. I had a good feeling that this was one of those times I was supposed to concentrate on the moment. Surely it was why Duo had left me here with Anastasia while he attended Quatre and Relena's security detail for their interview with the E-SUNBC. Maybe. To be fair I hadn't left the house in several days and I wasn't much feeling up to it today either and perhaps I was giving him less credit than he deserved. But this activity ended up being just as frustrating to me. Duo would've been better suited to something like this. I was inadequate.

"You should make a picture of uncle Duo."

She was back to happily coloring on her piece of paper and the way she said it was almost as if she was just making an off-handed suggestion. I frowned. That would be just like Relena.

"Why?" I couldn't help but ask, seeing as she was the resident expert at this activity and I was a genuinely confused.

Then Anastasia turned to me and gave me a look that could've come straight from her mother – and probably had a time or two. Though, it could've been worse – it could've been a look from her father.

"Because you love him. Duh."

I swear she almost rolled her eyes at me but I didn't really mind. This information was at least somewhat useful to me.

"You draw pictures of people you love?" I asked, honestly curious, and she turned back to the picture she was working on, one finger pointing to the people in the picture.

"Yeah – it's mommy, daddy, and me. I love them."

It was a crude representation, I'll say that, only resembling Quatre, Relena, and herself in the vaguest of ways, but I understood what she was getting at. They were all holding hands and had hearts colored in around them.

"I see," I replied, contemplating the picture, not quite sure what a drawn picture of Duo and I holding hands with rudimentary representations of hearts would mean to anyone.

But then I had an idea.

I was fairly experienced with drawing technical schematics. Much of my time with Doctor J involved tracing them over and over again until I developed memorization techniques based on typical archetypes. I had never found much use for that particular skill set outside of missions, but it was oddly comforting to use those skills for something outside of monotonous recall.

Therefore my drawing was obviously far less primitive than hers, but in many ways no less meaningful. And Anna watched me with half an eye as I worked, offering color suggestions and where I should put glitter. It was a little ridiculous given the subject matter, but I acquiesced to her superior knowledge of this activity, which I wouldn't even be participating in without her guidance, and indulged her whims.

And actually, it was fairly relaxing, using this skill for such a mundane task. That in and of itself surprised me – typically I couldn't cope with attempting to apply skills I considered military to civilian settings, finding it difficult to let go of ingrained training and taking the activity too seriously. But Anna's suggestions were preposterous and kept me focused on how inconsequential the task truly was. If it were up to me, on my own however, I might've struggled more, becoming mono-focused on every tiny detail. As it was, pouring silver glitter into the grating on Deathscythe's chest was hardly a very accurate representation.

Although somehow the addition of it to Duo's hair seemed impossibly more accurate as I considered the way the light had hit it that day, the last time I had seen him after the Barton Rebellion before I left on my ill-fated quest for self-discovery. I'm sure he didn't even see me standing there in the Preventer hangar bay, hidden in the darkness of the warehouse, watching him standing atop his Gundam for the last time. We'd hardly said three words to each other since I was discharged from the hospital but really – what was there to say? The war was over. We were no longer comrades – none of us were. Wufei had the right idea, leaving immediately afterward. Drawing out the inevitable only made it more difficult. Not that I had had much of a choice but still, these other boys were the closest thing I'd ever had to friendship, the war a purpose, and now I had nothing.

Duo seemed reluctant too, hesitant to take that final flight, leaning into the helmet of Deathscythe as if trying to comfort a friend on death row. Trowa and Quatre had already left for the detonation site, I had seen them blaze across the horizon as I stepped into the bay, but Duo was just like me – he had nothing to go back to once this was over and he just needed another minute.

"Well, you'll have to practice," Anastasia told me with a heavy sigh as she studied my work with critical blue eyes, much like her father's.

I blinked and looked down at my nearly finished handiwork and I suppose for a child it was too precise, not fanciful enough, no emotion – but to me I saw everything so clearly it was like being there again and while I make an attempt to live without regret, I still wonder what would've happened had I gone to their detonation site too – had I asked him where he was going then.

"I guess you'll just have to come back," I offered and though I'm sure Duo could've made it sound better – less cold, more genuine – she still smiled at me.

"And maybe uncle Duo can help."

I was nodding my head in agreement when I heard the door downstairs open and Duo's warm voice filter down the hall to the office, in deep conversation with our friends. Suddenly, I was embarrassed of my picture and slid it under the other construction paper as Anna gathered up her own drawings and hopped off the chair, holding out her hand for mine to go and meet her parents.