Respect

By trivia-game

Disclaimer: Not mine. And you're lucky too. **cue evil cackle**

Warnings: Serious angst, death, suicide, slight shonen ai. Trowa's POV.

Summary: Heero is gone. Trowa speculates.

Note-ness: This was hard for me to write. Suicide is a very heavy, very real subject for me. Know that you're loved.

I watched, silently.

Quatre cried loudly. Duo sobbed quietly. Wufei lowered his head. Heero was still…he would be still for a long, long time, beneath the cold earth, beneath the heavy lid of a coffin.

I'd never really shown it…never shown how much I respected Heero. I could lie to myself and say I never got the chance, but that's a lie. I suppose I'd been hoping that I'd been conveying to him that I cherished his presence and admired his strength.

I had admired, anyway.

"How could he do this?" Duo demanded, hoarsely. His eyes were half-lidded, weighed with pain. "How…?"

Quatre looked at him with equally clouded and confused eyes.

"I don't…I don't know…" The blonde ex-pilot's voice cracked as he answered, broken with tears.

I didn't respect that man, Heero, anymore. If I had known he was ready and willing to do this…to take his own life…

How much respect could someone have for a person so prepared to abandon his friends and lovers and peers with the gentle pop of a lid and the rattle of too many pills? I bore no respect, but so much sympathy.

Quatre's hand was white. He was clutching Duo's knuckles tight enough to encourage more tears. It was a point to focus on. A point besides the unearthly stillness in the air of the cemetery.

The fresh dirt was moist below us. A tiny, humble marker was thrust up from the ground. It was temporary, just a little sign on a stand that read: YUI, HEERO. There had been debate over what was to be written on the headstone. Much debate. What name to use, whether or not to even use one, comments, dates, monument…

There was to be no real monument, no comments, no dates. "Yui, Heero," was to be engraved on a simple square and laid atop the ground.

I soon found myself wanting no indication he had ever been alive. Nothing. No trace that something human could cause so much wicked pain in the people who loved him. No evidence that he had ever killed. I wanted him buried, and if he had been willing to kill himself to erase his presence, I was willing to oblige his hope.

Quatre had wanted a monument, something tall, sweeping. Anything to show the world that a hero rested beneath the wet, unkempt grass and freshly-strewn earth. I had little doubt that he would have stood atop his grave and called out his sad fate to the world, had we let him, just so that he could feel Heero hadn't left.

Duo held Quatre's hand just as tightly, trying to hold him from the pain that was surely engulfing him. Only once Heero had left, did it become evident how much everyone really did care for him, though in different ways.

"I don't know…"

Quatre's words seemed so appropriate, it was as though they were scripted. I don't know. And it's true—none of us know anymore. He had been perfect. He had been strong.

But maybe he wasn't the strongest of us. Maybe we were all weak. That's probably it.

I don't know. I doubt anyone did. I just don't know anymore.

Sooooo… wow, that was really hard to write. This is my first experience writing with Trowa. Wow.