I saw Heero, and Duo was with him.

"Duo, we have to go."

He turned to me, eyes blind and wet. "Quatre – "He reached for me, pulling me down to my knees, next to Heero.

"Quatre, he's dead."

For a dead person, Heero looked strangely alive. The explosion had not burnt his skin or broken his bones or fragmented his head. But the force had destroyed his internal organs, and it had only been a matter of minutes for Heero.

"I know, Duo. But we have to go."

Duo buried his head in Heero's unflinching chest. "You were supposed to be perfect," he whispered, voice hoarse and broken.

"He still is perfect, Duo." My heart grieved. "Duo, we have no time."

"Heero, we have to go," Duo wept. "But you will wait for us, won't you? Won't you?"

I wrapped an arm around Duo's shaking shoulders.

"Let's go," Trowa said quietly from the doorway behind us, silhouetted by the flames. "It is time."

Together with Wufei, we straggled to support each other.

"He will wait for us, where the war is over," Duo promised us as we fell into the silence in our souls.

Without Heero things were more difficult. There were other pilots, sent to fill the fifth Gundam, but none of the same calibre. After we had had to abort a mission to rescue the sixth, and after he had died anyway, it became clear that it would just have to be the four of us. And so there was peace, and it lasted a while.

I was approached to join Mariemaia, but I could not bear to turn my back on the memory of what Heero had died for. Thus the war began anew, Quatre was sent to retrieve the Gundams, and I took my place once more, this time in the vacant Gundam. None of the others could bear to pilot Wing.

Things happened as they happened, and events unfolded as they unfolded, and I was the only one in the right place and time to stop Dekim from dropping X-18999 on earth. Perhaps Heero could have done it and lived; I was not Heero.

Dying was not what I thought it would be.

There was a flash of black red white.

There was a falling.

There was the earth.

Then there was the sky, it was bright, it was white. There was light, and the light enveloped me.

I had thought I would regret dying. There was no regret.

I had thought I would fear death. There was no fear.

There was only Duo's voice crackling over the static-brushed intercom, mourning for me, telling me to wait for the rest of them, when the war was over.

For me, the war was over.

When the war was over, we stopped to take stock of our lives. Heero had not made it. Wufei had not made it.

Quatre had been the scapegoat. He stood up to take responsibility for what he had done, under the Zero system. Never mind that the responsibility was not his to take. He said that the people wanted closure, that they needed someone to blame for the deaths. He said that if he didn't give himself up for us, one day the world would turn against us, and we knew he was right. He was graceful and dignified as he took our place at the stake. When they passed judgment I was watching the news at home. I broke down, but he didn't.

They were lenient, or so they thought. He was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. The house was beautiful, the gardens lush.

But Quatre had been a pilot. He had known the glory of space and the freedom of flight. He had tasted the food of every colony in the system and slept under the skies of every continent on Earth. He had walked the deserts, swam the oceans, skied the mountains, trekked the jungles. He had seen the sun come up in space, watched the planets turn, heard the silence of the universe. Their terrible mercy destroyed him more than they realised.

His house, his hell, mocked him with its wallpapered walls and open windows. He cried every night, the first summer, and then some. The rooms grew smaller as the years grew longer and more unbearable.

When we visited him, he sat, lord and captive of his castle, in the largest hall to welcome us. He was a little bit more dead every time. At first he had suffered painfully, sobbing as he wondered why the people he had fought for had made him a prisoner in his own home. Later, he grew silent, reticent, until he no longer responded to us when we visited him. We would call him, but he would rock wordlessly to himself, no more in our world. Become a ghost. A shadow.

The last time we visited, the house was no longer so beautiful and the gardens no longer so lush. Weeds and parasites twisted through the grounds and hung from the trees, swinging in the wind as we walked up the road to the house. The building itself had been white, but the paint had turned grey and peeling, and moss grew down the walls. The wood of the main door and the windows was cracked and split from exposure. There was a smell of decay.

Quatre looked at us dully, and acknowledged us for the first time in years. He turned to us, opening his arms. Duo and I exchanged glances, then accepted his offered embrace.

"I'm going to go now," Quatre sighed into our ears. "I will wait for you." He held us this way for hours, and we held him. And then he kissed Duo, and then he kissed me, and then he closed his eyes. He had willed himself to die.

Duo laid him on the bed, facing the window he had stared out of for so many years. The sun was setting, and threw red and golden light into the room. Quatre's pale hair caught the light and it was glorious.

"He had loved the sunset," was all Duo said, as we left.

I had loved Quatre, but he had never allowed me to stay with him. "Only one of us needs to be the prisoner," he always insisted gently. "If you love me, you will grant me this." Of course I had to, and of course I hated myself for it.

I thought my heart had broken that day when Quatre stepped into the grounds of his house and the gate locked behind him. I thought it had been crushed beyond repair, when I saw him cry out and collapse on the path, knowing he would never leave.

But it was only when Quatre died that my heart had really broken. And I heard it break. It was not the clear painful sound of crystal shattering, but the muted grudging crack of a dried twig snapping. That was all. It was not grand, it was not beautiful, it was not achingly painful. It was just – that.

I wrote my final letters, and loaded my final bullet. I made my final call to Duo. It was a heavy burden I was forcing on him, to live for the rest of us, to bear alone the weight of the coming years. I apologised.

He nodded, said he understood. I promised to wait for him. We cried, over the vidphone, and then he was gone.

And then I was gone.
I thought the bitterness would fade as time passed, but it didn't. I thought the loneliness would ease as I got older, but it only grew worse. I thought the emptiness would be filled, but it only became more acute.

The years turned. I got married, had the fights, had the child, had the divorce. For four days a year I would hide in a room, drinking myself into oblivion, and everybody understood. For Trowa. Quatre. Wufei. And Heero.

It was hard to understand. When we fought, we had fought for peace, and peace was supposed to be glorious. But now, with life so mundane, it didn't seem worth it. Death had been terrible – but life was worse.

I was tired. It was the end of a long, long life, the end of the many, many years of existence. My hair grew white and thin, my back grew crooked and pained, and my eyes grew rheumy and feeble. The war had become first memory and then history. People forgot. What had we died for? I forgot. I was tired.

But there were things I didn't forget.

I remembered the birth of my son. I cried at the miracle of having created life, and not death. But soon after, he was gone, and I had lost custody. My wife remarried, and I never saw my son again. He had a father; it was not me. I remembered the ache of knowing I had missed seeing his first steps, missed hearing his first words, missed the chaos of his childhood, missed his schooling, missed his graduation, missed his life.

I remembered well the years of peace, but I remembered better the war.

I remembered the small ramen place that we used to go to during the war, whenever we were in Brussels. Set lunch for only 5 Euros, really cheap. I remember the ting of the chime when we pushed open the door. The restaurant had closed down decades ago, just before the turn of the century. Currency was now standardised in Universal Credits.

I remembered a safe house with a swimming pool on L1. We spent almost every afternoon in the pool, swimming, horsing around. It had been summer, we had been young. Stealing moments from an adolescence none of us ever had. I remembered sunlight, sparkling splashing water, laughter, friendship. Deck chairs. White and blue striped pool towels. With the economic boom of the twenties, the house had been demolished to make way for the expansion of the commercial district. Now, a squat grey and glass office building sat glumly where it used to be.

I remembered Quatre's last day, the smell of sickness in his gardens and the death of despair in his empty face. When we left the house, the sunset had been magnificent, bathing the world in a colour like blood-red wine. I remembered Quatre as a young man, gentle and kind, and Quatre at his last, empty and broken. Quatre's death had been the end of an era.

I remembered Heero, all of Heero. I remembered his expressions serious and amused, his eyes clouded and clear, his laughs deadly and amused. I remembered his silhouette against the backdrop of a disappeared world and demolished cities. I remembered the way he piloted his Gundam, the peculiar grace and finesse with which he moved, and which Wufei never managed to achieve while he was flying Wing. I remembered his last breath, and his closing eyes, and the last excruciating look at his face, his beautiful face, forever fifteen.

My life had been long.

I looked out of the window; the sun was setting. The curtains were set aflame by the brilliant colours, like the light the day Quatre had died, like the flames the day Heero had died.

"Duo." Trowa smiled at me. "We have waited for you."

I smiled back, looking at the space where he stood by my bed.

Quatre stepped out, face suffused with joy. "It is time. Let's go, Duo."

Wufei was there too. "The war is over. I promised you."

I nodded.

And then there was Heero. "I have been waiting for you," he said. He held his hand out to me.

"Let's go."