Heero stepped out of the shower and let the November chill hit him. There was something oddly pleasant about taking a very hot shower, as though it renewed every nerve and fibre, and it was one of the few luxuries he indulged in as often as he could. He walked up to the mounted mirror and brushed a palm over his cheek, testing whether he'd need to have another shave but instead found himself looking at his torso.
Living for the last three months with Relena had been comfortable, a little too comfortable given the fact he could pinch a little of the flesh on his tummy. Her home-cooked meals were nothing short of expertly design and executed, and with his overly large appetite he noted he may have to consider upping his exercise regime in compensation.
He'd been keeping himself useful. Being unable to drive, Relena was generally reliant on others in that regard and when he'd first seen the pile of reports on her desk that needed clearing he felt the instant need to purge them on her behalf. He'd even managed to weed out some of the exaggerations, mis-informations and even outright lies that she'd been seemingly fed on a daily basis, from those who would seek to use her relative inexperience against her. He may not be active in the field anymore but he kept his threads tied to enough sources to keep himself fresh. She was a busy woman, and he was glad he was able to take some of that pressure off of her in exchange for her kindness.
Relena wasn't the type to pressure him, and he was grateful for that. But he'd come here for a reason and he was, through distraction and procrastination, avoiding his obligations under his given duty to himself.
His mind wandered back to the mission at hand every now and then and he was sometimes forced into the debate. He, at least, knew he wanted to stay put in Brussels. It was a start. When he'd told Relena she'd tried unsuccessfully to mask how pleased she was and in a way it was an ego boost for him to know that he had this place where he was always wanted. It didn't make sense to want to be anywhere else.
But when it came to the execution of that plan, he had no strategy and no way forward and simply thinking about what it involved and how to get there was exhausting. Still, as comfortable as he was, there was that scratching sensation at the back of his mind when he knew he had something to do and it was incomplete and it would eventually bother him into action.
If he was going to do this, he would need Relena's guidance. He wasn't proud, far from it, and he was all but a virgin to the experience of living for the sake of living. He just wasn't well versed at asking others for help after a life time of being forced to figure things out on his own. And, in the last three months, it took a remarkably short time to pick up where they had left off those years ago, building on a friendship that had never truly faded but hadn't had the change to blossom in the way he now knew was possible. Growing up had changed them and, he suspected, allowed that progression to be made; he was thankful for that.
"Are you decent?" A cautious voice called from the bathroom door and Heero turned off the tap, snapping himself out of his thoughts and grabbing a towel to wrap around his waist.
"In a sense," he responded, and her head peered through the crack in the door, with a slightly pink tinge to her face. Well, he had warned her.
"Dinner's almost ready. Did you want broccoli cheese or buttered peas?"
Before Heero could request healthy helpings of both, the phantom feeling of his tummy between his fingers made him backtrack. "No thanks," he responded, hoping she wouldn't be offended but she smiled anyway.
"Peas without the butter?"
Heero wasn't sure whether she was psychic or she had also noticed his extra tissue, and he fought the petty urge to cover up his top half, but he nodded anyway and she slipped back through the crack in the door with a quick wave.
With her gone, Heero looked in the mirror again. Being on the receiving end of one of his own glares was an experience he didn't care to repeat, and he resolved in that moment to buy a house on a very large hill.
"I'll teach you to cook sometime," she reached down from behind him and picked up his plate, all but polished from his enthusiastic consumption of her meagre offering of macaroni and cheese. It was the end of the month, and she couldn't go to the market until the weekend , so needs must. Still, the lonely bit of chorizo she'd found at the back of the fridge had given it a little something, even if it was essentially the simplest dish in the known universe.
Heero got up, as he always did, to wash the dishes. It was a happy arrangement. She cooked, he cleaned. It made her a little sad for the day he would leave her townhouse sanctuary into one of his own and she'd be stuck with dry, dish soap hands again.
"You're welcome to try," Heero grumbled and she smiled. His first attempt at reciprocating her culinary gifts had resulted in a short bout of gastro-enteritis that had left her bed bound for a couple of days. The poor man had felt so guilty afterwards, he treated the kitchen like a plague ward. Still, it had been nice to take a break, albeit an uncomfortable one. It resolved her to take more time from work when she had the chance, instead of letting her own life get away from her.
Somehow Relena had a feeling his new, and first, abode would be particularly Spartan in the kitchen area. Plenty of can openers, though.
"Have you thought any more about what sort of place you'd like?" She asked casually, reaching into the fridge for a bottle of wine. She didn't like to pressure him; she wasn't entirely sure she wanted him to leave at all even if it was to another part of the same city. It was lonely, just being her, with no real friends around and her mother still flittering around the social elite in Japan. She hadn't minded that until he'd come back into her life and she was given a stark reminder of what she'd been missing. Still, Heero had come to her asking for help and help she would, even if that meant pulling him out of his own rut.
Heero took a glass from the rack and held it out to her, his lathered hands leaving wispy foam on the stem, and she obligingly filled it for him. Sharing a bottle of wine in the evenings had become something of a ritual. Neither would consider themselves alcoholic, per se, but it took the edge off and facilitated some of the most invigorating conversations she'd ever had. Who else would debate with her the virtues of a drone-worker system in the initial phases of the Mars Terraformation?
"Some," he said taking a gulp of his wine with a grimace and she knew then he'd needed it. She didn't know what difficulties he'd been having in working this out for himself, but she found there was nothing better for clarity than an intimate liaison with Mr Pinot Grigio. "I know I want to live out of the city proper."
"Too crowded?" she guessed, and he nodded his agreement.
"Crowded places have their uses; they're easy to hide in, convenient in terms of resources and there's always someone you can use to your advantage."
Relena frowned at his line of thinking. "That's a bitter way to view the world you live in."
"Exactly. If I'm going to do this, I need to get out of that mind-set." He moved the glass back to his lips before realising there was none to drink, and Relena took the cue to refill. Tonight, it seemed, would be a long one.
"And out of the city." She agreed. Personally, she liked the hustle and bustle, having lived the quiet life herself as a young girl but she supposed she could apply the same logic to Heero's reasoning. After a lifetime of gunfire and explosions, now was the time for quiet. "There're some very nice rural areas around. A lot of the farms are moving outwards to profit from the increased land value since Brussels became the new governmental capital. If you can afford it, there's plenty of old farm houses going."
Heero stared into his wine and considered it for a second before shaking his head. "I want to move out of the city, not out of civilisation."
Relena arched an eyebrow at him. "So you want to be out of the way but with all the modern conveniences you currently enjoy on a platter?" Good luck with that, she thought. Colonists enjoyed a higher level of technological advancement than that of Earth. They drove automatic cars, where earthlings tended to drive manual, they had electric doors while earth had good old fashioned brass handles…and that was in the cities. There were parts of the Brussels countryside with absolutely zero mobile signal or wireless internet.
"I didn't think it'd be too much to ask…" he groused, looking away from her as a sure sign he'd been embarrassed by his own naiveté on the matter and suddenly Relena felt a little guilty. She should be more supportive of his relatively little experience in the fine art of location hunting, and she shouldn't tease him.
Much.
"I think we need to gather some sources of inspiration." She put her glass down on the counter, and Heero moved to re fill it. The tablet he'd procured for her was a useful little thing, even if it was infuriatingly hard to use at first, and since then she found curling up and just browsing the world on a seven inch screen was just her kind of therapy.
Maybe that was what Heero needed; to view the world he intended to inhabit and see what inspires him to stay.
"Have you ever heard the phrase home is where the heart is?" Heero sat down beside her and peered intrigued at her motions on the pad. She felt him move closer to her to get a better view and began to feel a little warm. "Maybe if you look at some examples, you'll get an understanding of what you want?" She finished, just as her page loaded.
La Vie Bruxelles
Heero folded one large hand over hers and gently moved it to the side so he could see. She felt a little heat on her face; he was getting awfully familiar lately and she wasn't sure how she felt about her own reactions to it. It wasn't intimate, beyond their deepening friendship, or even suggestive. She acknowledged, with no small measure of self-depreciation, that she'd had something close to a crush on this man as a girl, him being in her mind the first thing to excite her in an otherwise unexcitable life. By the time the war had ended, that had dissipated into a deep respect and admiration that was much more spiritual than anything else.
Now, being nothing shy of really quite gorgeous, here she was going through it all over again, and she felt every bit the silly girl she had five years ago.
So she took a breath, and took herself to a place in herself she usually reserved for her work, and blocked out all distractions.
"I've been out to this area a couple of times," she explained, pointing to a map with several house-shaped pins sticking out of it, "it's rural but it has a smallish village in the centre with all your essentials. I've never had any issue getting any signal there, either."
Heero tapped one of the pins in interest and photos popped out at them of a reasonably sized cottage that looked as though it had been recently refurbished. "Not bad. It's a short drive from the ring road."
"So you like it?" She asked, enthused by his first indication of interest since they'd started this venture.
"Not really," she deflated, something he seemed to notice as he explained himself, "I'm not very appreciative of antiquity in general. Houses like that come with a lot of character but a lot of risk."
Relena, took a sip from her glass and nodded her understanding. That, she thought, was where they would differ. She was rather fond of antiquity but then a large portion of earthlings were, having a vast and varied history where colonists had just over two decades' worth. History in colonial schools was taught as in the same way physics was taught in Earth schools; it was too obscure for anyone to really take interest.
"Oh, that one looks nice," she pointed to a house built near a slip road by the village, "it's a recent build, too. Only 60 years."
Heero looked at her like he wanted to agree with her but when he looked back at the screen he shook his head again. "Five bedrooms is a bit excessive for a single male."
"I guess," she sighed, leaning back against her chair, sensing a pattern in their current efforts, "though you won't be single forever."
The words were out of her mouth before she'd really processed them in her own head. She had work mode to thank for that. It was the logical thing to say, it made sense to, but in the context of the unwanted ghosts of old sentiments humming through her alcohol-tainted veins it immediately took her right back onto a topic she wasn't all that comfortable with.
She took a larger sip from her glass than she'd intended and peered up over the rim at him, hoping he mistook the redness on her face for intoxication.
"Probably not," he agreed, not seeming to notice anything out of place at all. He, at least, took it at face value, as something logical he should take into consideration and took that as a prompt to change his search details to 2-3 bedroom. But something in the fact that he could say that so easily disturbed her.
She spoke without really thinking, but her curiosity was roused. "How is your dating life?"
It was a question she asked quite a few people she had run ins with. She'd asked Quatre once with the pure and honest intention of hoping he'd give her the good news he'd come to terms with his feelings for another of the Gundam pilots. She'd never met Trowa Barton, but for all the respect both Heero and Quatre seemed to have for him, she knew she would like him instantly. But this wasn't Quatre, or Dororthy or her unlucky-in-love PA or the lady that cleans her office after hours.
This was Heero and while the concept of the question shouldn't mean anything different, somehow, it really did.
Heero looked at her coolly, but something in his eyes told her he was gauging whether or not to enter this line of conversation. So, as seemed to be their mutual means of bypassing any natural inhibitions, he drained the last of his glass and reached for the bottle, before realising it was a few drops from empty.
"I wouldn't call it dating," he began, distracting himself with flicking through the listings near the village, "I was on the move a lot. And, I was still trying to grow up. With Duo as testament, being treated like an adult for the majority of your life doesn't make you one."
It was a sentiment she had been trying to put into words herself for a long time, and she smiled for the resonance Heero's experiences had with her own. It was something so few understood, being two of very few in their unique positions, and Relena herself hadn't felt ready to let someone into her life until she was twenty. Even then, she was too emotionally immature and too distracted to really foster anything close to a functional relationship.
"But, growing up had its own issues and there were times…needs must."
One thing endearing about Heero was that you'd never something as telling as a blush on his face. He hid the signs of his embarrassment behind a mane of chocolate hair as his ears turned crimson. Still, when you knew to look as Relena did, his meaning became clear.
"Poor girls," she joked, trying to ignore the images putting Heero in a sexual context conjured in her mind. She'd seen Heero in a towel more than a few times but it was decent enough not to really think anything of it. Suddenly it was all she could think of. "You've blazed a trail of broken hearts across the globe."
"You make it sound worse than it is…" he looked away from her back at the screen, clearly a little perturbed at having his own promiscuity on display, but she didn't judge him for it. As he'd said, needs must, and if she was honest with herself it wasn't a concept she was all that unfamiliar with. Not that he needed to know that.
"How about that one," she pointed out, changing the topic for the sake of his painfully red ears, "it's a moderate size, quite modern?"
"It's on low ground," he shook his head, "when the rains come that'll be a problem."
Relena wanted to disagree with him, but he was probably right. She couldn't recall ever being this picky about her town house. She just…liked it, as soon as the agent let her in the door and she just knew it was for her. But, she wasn't everyone and Heero, as it turned out, was picky. He had a right to be picky, and she suspected that it had a lot to do with the fact that he was making this decision in the first place.
Why do anything without the intention to do it right?
His words from his first stay with her, during a long and painful recovery, echoed through her. He'd managed to get her laptop, which had met an unfortunate end at the hand of a cup of coffee and her own clumsiness, to the point where it was miraculously functional and even faster than it had been before. When she'd thanked him for it, he took it back off her and immediately started pulling it apart again. Why? She'd asked him.
There was a pixel out in the corner. And that was just the sort of person Heero was. The same person that offered his life to each and every member of Marshall Noventa's family to properly atone for a mission gone horribly wrong. Thorough.
If anybody was going to present Heero with a house, it would have to be as though he himself built it.
"Heero!" she gasped, before quickly snapping her mouth shut, embarrassed at being too carried away with her own revelation her volume control had temporarily lapsed. "Heero, what if you build your own?"
As expected, he was instantly intrigued, and she knew she'd hit the spot. He'd told her a couple of months ago that he wanted to be an engineer. He loved engineering, from gizmos to cars to pipework and beyond. Her library, where once it had been filled with trashy pulp fiction novels and a shameful amount of rather detailed romantic novels, was now bursting at the seams with manuals, research papers and blueprints.
If he needed the motivation to see this through, this would be it.
"Build my own…" he said the words as though testing the idea through sound alone, and instantly he drifted into his own thoughts and she knew she'd won him over.
Heero Yuy was in planning mode, and from first and experience she knew there'd be no stopping him.
When he got up to fetch his laptop from the kitchen counter she smiled and walked back to the fridge.
"I'll get another bottle, shall I?"
