Title: Like Magic
Author: Karina
Rating: PG
Pairing: Heero Stephan
Notes: Challenge 28. Baby Series 2 #38. Takes place approximately sixteen hours after A Light In The Darkness
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters from the series but the baby is mine.
Many thanks to Dulin for her work as beta.
Like Magic
He stirred in his sleep, a small thumb slipping between fine lips. Heero shivered in reaction as something within him dissolved. It was like magic. Something hard and cold quivered and shattered and filled him with a warmth and a despair he did not understand. Where did the Perfect Soldier he was supposed to be go at sight of this small piece of humanity?
His feelings for Relena were different, but just as intense and frightening. He didn't understand how easily the girl had slipped past the training J had subjected him to. From the time they had first met there had been something about her that threatened that part of him, drew him and made the weight of his soul lighter.
"Like magic." He reached to caress pale wisps of hair. "Both of you are like magic. I can't stop this softening inside of me and I don't really want to try. I can understand it's a physical attraction between myself and Relena, but it's not physical with you. How do you do it, Stephen? How do you make me feel my heart? How do you make that heart melt just by lying there?"
His training was falling apart and he was not sorry. He could kill a man in fifty different ways; that training was still there and would always be but that other training … that conditioning to close off his emotions was another matter.
He had broken conditioning before and the memory of a little girl and her puppy would forever haunt him. He had broken conditioning and known the human pain of loss, grief and despair in the aftermath of his mission and for his humanity he had been reconditioned. It was neither desired nor required that their weapon have a heart.
"Is it because you are a symbol? Fresh, new; untouched by war and death. Never known fear as I have feared, or as your father knows fear living each day knowing it could be the last. He has made decisions that change the world. So many lifetimes lived within one life. He would be happiest if you never learned his past, but he is the most realistic man I know and tragically he knows it will come. You will learn the sins of your father and from one likely to speak from malice with no understanding. Someone with no concept of how things were and why it took such sacrifice to turn the world around and start again. That was the greatest magic, Stephen. Changing war into peace. Looking at you I know why we are fighting to see peace grow; to start afresh, leave the war behind us but remember its lessons. We need to remember and avoid the mistakes of our ancestors. I want to live my life, hopefully with Relena and I think I would like to have my own innocence sleeping in a cot with the future stretching ahead. A dream I want to become reality so badly."
End
Karina Robertson 2006