Twenty Years
Happy 20th birthday, Gundam Wing! This fic is written for the Endless Reflection Challenge here on FFN to celebrate. This takes place twenty years after the end of Endless Waltz, for reference.
This fic discusses Heero having PTSD and his nightmares and flashbacks can be kind of gruesome, so if you're uncomfortable with or are triggered by discussion of things like dismemberment please take care.
These nightmares still come at night, creeping in when I least expect them, driving sleep away from my grasp and leaving me gasping for air and dripping in sweat. It's been a long time since then, twenty years now, and they still leave me breathless and, though I will never admit this, in tears. Only the man sleeping beside me has ever seen that, however, but I've never been able to tell him why, or tell him what I see sometimes when I close my eyes and try to dream of happier things. Or not dream at all. I can't make myself tell him that all I see after bright white explosions against a pitch dark night sky, fireworks that I created at a mobile suit factory, is a Leo collapsing on an apartment complex and then nothing but smoke and debris.
Even now I can still feel the ground vibrating, can still taste the dirt as the smoke burns my lungs and my ears ring. The bed shakes and I know it's because of Duo sleeping beside me shifting, noticing that I'm not next to him anymore and sleeping peacefully. It's his hand that lightly touches my shoulder, but I can't pull myself away from the memories that are just as vivid now as they were back then. I will never not remember what I saw after the smoke cleared away and snow fell, gently, stark contrast to the violence that caused them in the first place.
The building is gone, nothing left but the raw materials used to construct it. Steel beams, what's the left of the skeleton, now bent at awkward angles on the ground, twisted and useless. They jut out of rubble, mostly dry wall and people's personal effects. And I can do nothing except stare at this destruction. Destruction that I created. All of this overlayed over the bedroom window that I'm actually staring out of, but I don't see anything out there. But then I see...
My body jerks and I shiver and hear Duo murmur something, but I can't make it out, he's too far away despite being right next to me. I'm there and yet not there, my body in one plane of existence and my mind, my eyes, in another. As I did through the rubble I find bodies.
Bodies.
Bodies everywhere.
Bodies in positions bones could never move into.
Bodies that are missing limbs. Some just one. Others there are more. Broken dolls in a junk heap. Mangled. I am no stranger to this, not with the training I've had and the life I've led even before J found me and took me in. But as I dig through more of the debris, I come across a dog and my stomach twists in ways that signal upset.
I heave, but don't throw up. Duo murmurs soothingly, and I feel like I'm falling until I hit something solid and something strong wraps around me. He can't see what I'm seeing, can't feel what I'm feeling and in a way I envy him, envy his ability to sleep at night, how he doesn't have to be stuck in this endless loop of seeing bodies, very broken bodies, and a dead dog on the ground.
But that isn't even the worst of it, because what's under the knocked over wall next to the dog is her owner and my stomach twists again and I try to look away, but I can't, my eyes are glued to her and I come to the conclusion that I am a monster.
"You're not a monster," is whispered in my ear and I cry out. I didn't even know I said that out loud.
"Yes, I am," I say.
"No." His voice is firm. He kisses my shoulder and I feel something soft in my hand. "You're not."
I feel the object Duo's placed in my hand. I run my fingers over each individual link in his braid, loosened a little from sleep, and the repetition and focus helps bring our bedroom into focus, helps calm me down enough to ground me.
"You gonna be okay, 'Ro?"
I blink a few times to shake free of the remaining images. I feel him rub my shoulders, his fingers trying to untense my muscles, and gradually they do.
"I'm tired," I say. He has me in his arms, I realise. "I just wanted to sleep..."
"I know." He presses a kiss to my temple. "You're safe, baby... You're safe and in my arms, in our bedroom."
"Sorry." My eyes flutter. "...For waking you."
"Hey, it's okay." I feel his fingers stroking my arm. "Wanna sleep like this?"
I nod.
"Okay, baby."
I've had nightmares for as long as I can remember. Faces of soldiers I've killed, mobile suits on the ground in a pile of scrap with their pilots either hanging out of the cockpits or they're nowhere to be found. These don't bother me as much, it's all part of being a soldier. They weren't innocent civilians.
That little girl and her dog were.
She is one mistake that not even twenty years will make me forget.