Title: Our happiness

Author: Omnicat

Rating: T

Genre: General, Angst, Romance

Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Everything Gundam Wing and all previous chapters of this story.

Warnings: Oblivious Heero. Perceived physical illnesses, psychological trauma and problems within a marriage. General adversity.

Pairings: As Heero percieves them: Heero Yuy x Relena Peacecraft, Duo Maxwell x Hilde Schbeiker, Wufei Chang x Sally Po, Quatre Winner x Trowa Barton, hints of not yet manifested Dorothy Catalonia x Lady Une. You know the rest.

Disclaimer: It's not my show. You should know this already.

Again, this part of the story is not meant to offend anyone. However, if anyone is offended by my portrayal of Relena as a silent rape victim, I hereby apologize for the limits of my imagination and empathic abilities.

Summary: Heero's side of the story, in all its oblivion... Reader participation is necessary here, to figure the differences and similarities out. This fic contains no bashing of any kind, and flames about the presented events will not be appreciated.

Author's Note: Remember that this is from Heero's point of view, and that Relena and Duo are doing everything in their power to keep what's going on a secret. Heero doesn't know the truth, and his judgement is influenced by his own state of mind. This is what he makes of it...

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Our happiness

The wars have left their marks on all those involved. Soldiers around the globe and everywhere in space still struggle to cope with their memories today, years after the last mobile suit was ultimately destroyed. Families lost members, leaving gaps that can never be truly filled again. Up close and personal, I've seen the war's devastating effects flourish in the hard-won peace.

Wufei and Sally are in and out of marriage counselling and plans of divorce, because Sally can't bring herself to quit her job at Preventors or remove the gun from under her pillow, and Wufei is (not necessarily wrongfully) paranoid about losing another wife in combat.

Dorothy had to give up both fencing and politics because she can't control herself when faced with an opponent, and passes her days working through men and practice targets.

Lady Une has been celibate since Treize's death, and sometimes, her professional demeanour slips and she gives me the impression that the loneliness is getting to her. Mariemeia's teenage years were as bad as they get. It disappointed her adoptive mother greatly.

Quatre has come to avoid the liquor cabinet like the plague. Trowa has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and the only reason he seems to care about anything, is for Catherine and Quatre's sake. Blood tests taken after a trapeze accident that cost Catherine her fiancé and left her in the hospital for the duration of her pregnancy, revealed that Trowa - or Triton - and Catherine really are siblings. It's always a juggle for Trowa to divide his time between his sister and cousin, and Quatre, his lover and empathic counterpart.

Zechs and Noin disappeared after Mariemeia's uprising and nothing has been heard of them since.

Hilde tells me Duo has nightmares almost every night, and he sometimes gets into dark moods in which he does and says things that make the hairs in the back of my neck stand on end. The God of Death has never left my friend, it seems. Irony has it that he and Hilde have never been able to have living children together. Hilde's body isn't able to nurture Duo's seed and create the life those two war orphans crave. Adoption proved difficult, but Duo has often enough gotten his way despite worse odds. He gave up much too easily, if you ask me. I'm concerned for Duo. He's a very dear friend to me, and I'd hate to see him lost to those dark moods. Hilde would be devastated.

Relena, my wife, became a real workaholic. She continuously overworked herself for years on end, and eventually ruined her health that way.

And me?

I watched those around me, the scant handful people I've ever cared about on a personal level, suffer from the after affects of the war and began to understand the grief I'd caused, not just to a small group of people, but thousands. Compared to the depression I fell into, my guilt trip over killing Noventa and the other Alliance peacemakers had been nothing. Nothing but another source to fuel my self-loathing. Hadn't I been the one to destroy the plane they were in? Hadn't I been the one that gave OZ such an excellent excuse to start a revolution?

I became so sensitive, so insanely aware of how fragile the human body and mind are, that I hardly dared to interact with anyone anymore, for fear of hurting them with my mere presence. I believed all the suffering going on around me was my fault, and if I'd been the same person I was at the beginning of or even midway through the war, I would have killed myself to rid the world of my presence.

Luckily, I wasn't. Relena had made it clear to me that my life was no longer worthless and dispensable, because there were now people who cared for me. Relena's unconditional love and need to see me well were both a blessing and a curse - because if I wasn't happy, Relena wasn't happy, and I considered Relena almost solely responsible for maintaining peace, so if I wasn't happy, it would jeopardize the peace. Out of all the friends I had, Relena was always most precious to me. So I came to her when the pain became too much to bear, and while Quatre said that he knew how I felt and Duo, who had also kept close to me, tried to cheer me up and everybody was just doing it all wrong, Relena asked me to tell her about it and listened to me, and still loved me after she'd heard it all. Relena's love was always all I needed to feel better and believe in myself again, and I love her with all my heart for that.

I've never been the same after that episode, and the past still haunts me, but all I need is Relena by my side to help me cope.

I know Relena feels the same way, though my love doesn't seem to have the same effect on her anymore as hers has on me. I guess it's because of me; my personality is too tainted, my heart too blemished to be able to give a love as pure as hers. But it never made her love me less. She's content with so little... But then again, what measly bit of happiness I have to offer was enough when her work still took up the vast majority of her time.

It surprised and puzzled me to learn how strongly the wars eventually turned out to have affected Relena. Grievous as the fate of me and our friends is, and harsh as it may sound, it was to be expected. Every single one of us, even young Mariemeia, had been involved in the fighting and killing of that age one way or another. Directly or indirectly, all our hands had been stained with blood. All but those of Relena. She didn't even manage to shoot Une.

And yet, her feelings of guilt turned out to be remarkably similar to mine. She felt that if she'd made better decisions, she could have avoided so much bloodshed. But unlike me, Relena was in a position from which she could directly help those she saw as her victims. Her station as Vice Foreign Minister, and for a while as President of the ESUN, made her one of the most powerful and influential people in the world, and she devoted almost all her time to rebuilding what had been destroyed during the war, and to make sure that history would not repeat itself.

She worked day and night, harder than anyone else, and never gave herself any time to rest. Though she insisted that she did not take too much work onto herself, but that the work was simply there and needed to be done, she confessed to me later on how she had realised that she hadn't dared to stop working even for a little while, because she feared rest would give the guilt the opportunity to catch up on her.

When she became pregnant of our first child - which was an amazing feat in itself, considering the stress her body was under at the time - Relena stepped down to a more modest position that allowed her to spend much more time at home, and even take much of her work home with her. For over seven years, her life had centred around her work. Now, it was time to enjoy her own life. I'm proud to say that I was the one she chose to share it with 'for all eternity'.

The first time she got sick was about four years into our marriage, around the time our second child was conceived. Our son was almost a year old at the time. At first, we thought it was an ordinary flu or food poisoning. Then, her nauseating nervousness was hard to distinguish from the morning sickness.

I had to force her to see a doctor when the complaints came back after the birth of our daughter. Relena suffered from nausea, sometimes even vomiting, and had trouble eating and sleeping. The first thing that came to everybody's minds was stress. But when the complaints started her life had been relatively relaxed compared to some other periods of time. One doctor thought of recursive stress; like a rubber band that snaps back violently when great pressure has been put on it, or a fatigue that only sets in when you've already recovered from the exertion, the stress her body had been able to ward off while she was under it, now came back to tackle her from behind.

The symptoms seemed to come in waves: I'd come home to find her ill, after which she wouldn't eat or let me touch her for the rest of the day, and sometimes the next. Over the course of the next few days she'd try to bring her eating and sleeping routines back to normal, only for the next wave of illness to disrupt them again.

Once the body-shyness passed she would be unusually tactile, wanting to snuggle close to me and have me hold her. For comfort, I guess. I'd never been used to any form of physical contact other than to sustain and inflict injuries, until Relena showed me how strong the emotional and physical effects could be. I still have a lot to learn; Relena and the kids still manage to surprise me. I'll never forget the day I turned out to be ticklish...

Maybe one day I'll understand why Relena has become so distant over the last few years. She hardly lets me touch or see her body anymore; the only time she undresses now is in the middle of the night, with all the lights off. Duo says that maybe she's ashamed of the fact that she's growing older, and her body is showing it. I have indeed seen that happen with a lot of women, but it just seems so unlike Relena... When she lets me have her, though, she shows me that she still truly loves my touch.

The time between the waves varied; sometimes she was fine for months before it resurfaced, others, she was felled several times in the course of the same month. After a while, it became clear that whatever was wrong with Relena was more than a bout of stress release. The nausea gradually passed, but she never slept peacefully anymore unless I held her in my arms all night. To this day, she refuses to take medication strong enough to help her.

Then, she became pregnant for the third time, had a miscarriage, and the spells started. With frightening and unpredictable frequency, she suffers from dizziness and faintness, all to often resulting in nasty falls. She doesn't always manage to go down right... The most worrisome thing is that the spells tend to occur after or during even moderate exertion, like hurrying up a set of stairs.

The few times she agrees to see a doctor, they can't find anything wrong with her except for the bruises caused by her frequent rough meetings with the furniture, so it must mean that her system has been permanently weakened. We figured the strain of pregnancy triggered the collapse, and gave up on having any more children.

But not just her body suffers. She cries, when we're alone. She cries so much... It breaks my heart every time I see tears well up in her eyes and she has to take what she needs from me on her own, because I don't know how to give it to her. My Relena, my strong, brave Relena, who could stare down the barrel of a gun and face a mobile suit ten times her size without batting an eyelash... it's just not fair that the kindness of her own heart, her selfless sacrifice, should cause her downfall.

And still she won't go easy on herself. Once the children had gotten old enough for school and didn't need our continuous attention anymore, she even returned to office work. It's almost like she's afraid to be alone. When the kids were still very young, she preferred to work at home, and she'd have friends over every time they were in the neighbourhood. Hilde and Duo, Quatre, Trowa or Dorothy, Sally or Catherine with their own children. Mrs Darlian and Pagan still come by almost every day. Ever since we married, I've avoided positions in the ranks of the Preventor organisation that would claim too much of my time.

Relena was surrounded by friends and family the entire time, and in her eyes I could see that it did her good. Now she is surrounded by scheming diplomats and demanding politicians again, and though she tries to hide it, it's visibly wearing on her.

No, we've never really had the perfect lives we dreamed of and fought for. The fighting is over, but the scars will always remain and some wounds will never fully heal. But can I say that I, or any of the others, are unhappy? No. The past has been blighted and will never leave us but the brightness of the present and future far outweigh that. We succeeded in creating a world for the next generation in which our shadows will serve a purpose, instead of being a burden.

Sally and Wufei wouldn't want anybody else than each other. Their constant bickering only serves to prove it.

Quatre, Trowa and Catherine form an unusual, but warm little family. Their relationship was a real eye-opener for me. Before I met Relena, love was not an issue in my life. Before I walked in on Trowa and Quatre under the mistletoe, with their hands buried in each others hair and their bodies molded together, I had never imagined such love to be possible between two men. But it made sense; I cherished the memories of the good times I had with Odin Lowe just as much as the scent of my mother's hair and her wordless lullabies. Where would the difference lie?

I have a feeling Dorothy and Lady Une might just follow Trowa and Quatre's example one day. Dorothy is a champion archer and markswoman. She has taken Mariemeia, who is beginning to quiet down again, as her protégé and is teaching her everything she knows.

Duo and Hilde love each other just as much as Relena and I love each other, and I couldn't wish for better friends than them. They love our children like they would their own. The kids consider them a second set of parents godparents should be. My little girl reminds me more of Duo than she resembles me, sometimes. She certainly has his sense of humour.

And despite Relena's tears, despite my nightmares, we don't let the bad overshadow all the good in our lives. Life, I have learned, is what you make of it. We want to be happy, with our family and friends, and we are.

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PSAN: Call me sadistic, go on. But please believe me when I say that I felt the same way while writing as you report to feeling when you read. This story was never really written for fun...