Disclaimer: Not mine, and maybe that's why parts are coming out so *slowly*… ^^;;

AN: I am *really* very sorry I'm so slow, but here's a nice juicy part for any of those dying for it to come out! ^^;; I swear, I've got the rest written, really!

Watching You

Part 8

There was motion above me – I assumed he was leaving.

I did not assume that he had crouched down before me, still holding my sweatshirt in his hand.

"I didn't think you were going to give up that easily," he commented softly.

"You overestimated me for once," I said flatly, as flat as the flat grey of the floor, ignoring the tone of his voice because I just couldn't listen to it anymore. "But I can't believe you didn't expect to win this, Chang. Well, you won. I give up. I can't do this anymore."

"Can't do what anymore?"
"I can't… I can't… care. About any of you – about Duo, or Quatre, or Trowa or Heero. About you."

A few drops of water rolled down my nose and dripped off onto the floor.

I hated crying.

Almost as much as I hated caring.

He sat down on the floor in front of me. I still didn't look at him. The floor was much easier to talk to, much easier to understand right now.

"Well, that's what I thought," he said softly. "But I also thought you were trying to talk me out of it."

"Well, I was failing."

"No, you were winning."

I looked up.

"But you gave up. Where's the strength in that?"

His eyes weren't quite so cold. In fact, they weren't cold at all.

"I'm *not* strong," I cried, begging him to believe it so he would stop *pushing* me and let me be. "Stop thinking that I am – or that I could be, or whatever, because I'm *not* and you can't make me, if that's what you were ever trying to do."

"Yes, you are."

"No I'm – "

"You're still alive," he said, voice still soft and calm and I could hear that now and it was scaring me almost as much as it was soothing me. "You went through hell and you're still alive, and that's more than I can say for the last person I resp– "

He paused for the briefest of instants, so brief that you couldn't even fit a heartbeat into it. "That's more than I can say for the last person I cared about. So don't go and give up now, baka."

He stood up, and I watched his feet walk around me.

He dropped my sweatshirt onto my head, and I heard his footsteps echo out of the room and down the hall, disappearing into cool, grey silence.

* * *

But I still couldn't trust him. There was still something in his eyes, when he'd looked at me and told me not to give up.

There was something in his eyes that *had* given up.

And I couldn't let him give up. I *wouldn't* let him give up. I owed him too much – I owed all the pilots too much – to let any one of them give up.

That, and I loved him too much. Because I knew I did, and there was no going back on that, either.

And so here I was, sitting hunched over in the back compartment of Shenlong, trying not to slide all over the small space as the suit made its way through the OZ base towards its objective.

I knew he would kill me if he found me here. Literally – I didn't doubt that Wufei would cause me fatal harm if he knew I was stowing away on *his* Nataku. But I also knew that he wasn't going to look back here unless I slipped up and made a sound, or moved too quickly, or something like that. I was a mechanic, and a good one by now – I knew this suit inside-out, even if I hadn't been allowed to so much as look at it for more than five minutes as of late.

I remembered the last time I was crammed into the back compartment of a Gundam. That had been Deathscythe, and I had been with Duo…

There was a violent explosion to the right; it nearly knocked me into the side but I caught myself at the last second. As it was I banged my head and saw spots for half a minute; while I tried to regain my sense of balance, a few more explosions rocked the suit, but these were farther away and not as violent.

That was one disadvantage to being back here – I couldn't tell what was going on.

Well… that wasn't entirely true… I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tiny radio that I'd stashed there. It was tuned to the suits' frequencies. I hadn't wanted to listen in. I had wanted to trust Wufei –

Another explosion rocked the suit, from behind it this time. The suit lurched forward, causing me to bang my head again.

The suit paused, as if its pilot had paused.

I stopped breathing, praying that he hadn't heard me hit the panel. I lay there, pressed against the deckplates that would slide open if he hit the right button, dumping me into the cockpit…

The suit moved again, and I risked drawing air into my lungs once more. That had been close. I would have to remember to put seatbelts back here…

I checked the radio, making sure it was still intact before placing the earpiece in my ear and clicking the channel on. Static and shouting filled my head, the battle suddenly washing over me through the Gundams' radio channel even as it raged on beside me, only about a meter's worth of metal and wiring between me and the blasts outside –

"Chang! What the hell *kkkzt* doing?! *Kkt* wrong *way*!"

"Turn around! Meet on the other side *kkzz* – "

Duo's frantic voice, followed by Heero's somewhat calmer but annoyed words.

Then Wufei's voice. Perfectly calm.

"There are too many suits here. The numbers were off. I'm going to take them all out at once."

My heart froze. He was *not* thinking what I thought he was –

He wouldn't. Hadn't I convinced him –

This was just a small battle, this was nothing worth –

"*Kk* -Fei!!! You are *not* – *kkkzzzz*" The channel cut off as Wufei jammed the signal, the close proximity of my radio to his jamming signal blocking my receiver as well.

I tore the radio out of my ear and threw it across the small space; it clattered against the opposite wall as I turned and jammed in the code that would open the door –

I tumbled out of the cockpit; there were still blasts going off all over the place and I landed at his feet on the floor plates of the small command space.

"What the hell – *onna*!" His angry voice rang out over me as I rubbed my temple and sat up, bracing myself between the instrument panel and the pilot's seat.

His voice was cold and his eyes were angry as he stared at me. I blinked up at him and saw that he had his hand on the self-destruct trigger –

"No!" I screamed at him, struggling up to my knees. "What the *hell* do you think you're doing?!"

His eyes narrowed as he looked down at me. His finger didn't move. "What does it look like I'm doing?" he hissed. "I want to know what the hell *you're* doing in here. What were you –"

"I was trying to make sure you weren't going to do something like *that*," I told him evenly, angrily, glancing at his hand.

He blinked, his face still angry as another explosion hit us. He made no move to counter the advancing mobile suit troops that I could see on his RADAR; I could also see that Heero and Duo were too far off to do anything.

"What the hell for?!" he asked. "Who are you to decide whether I –"

"No one!" I cried, gazing up at him and wishing he would take his hand off that button, knowing it was hopeless. "I'm no one. But who are *you* to…" I trailed off, not knowing what I had meant. Or, if I did know, not knowing if I could say it.

"You can't stop me," he hissed, voice heavy with fatigue. He was tired of all this.

Well, I was tired of all this, too.

"No," I said softly. "No, I can't. I… I don't think I was really planning on it," I admitted, maybe more to myself than to him.

It was strange. The world had suddenly grown fuzzy and distant. The explosions occasionally rocking the suit were mere tremors to me, the panels' beeping faraway and muffled. Even my mind seemed swathed in a thick blanket of cotton, detached from my actions here and now. But all the same…

I knew what I had come here to do. And it hadn't really been to stop him.

"Then what – what are you doing?" he growled, angry and now confused as I stood in the small space of the cockpit. Onyx eyes stared angrily up at me, sharp-edged and demanding. His finger didn't move.

"And how exactly did you plan on getting *yourself* out of this, onna?" he demanded, still trying to retain his anger through the confusion as he continued staring up at me.

"I… wasn't," was all I said as I sat on his lap and put my hand over his, my thumb on his thumb on the trigger.

I looked over at him. He was looking at me with an expression of anger and fear that I probably would have been afraid of, had I been attached to my mind at the moment. But I wasn't.

All I knew was that this was what I had to do right now.

I locked my eyes on his and told him what I knew I had to tell him. What I had really been thinking when I'd stowed away in the back compartment of his Gundam. Why I was really here.

"If you really want to die, then just tell me. But if you want to go then I'm going too, because I'm not going to live without you."

He stared at me, and the only things I could hear were the faraway sounds of explosions and RADAR alarms. The only thing I could feel was my hand, too-small over his, and the trigger beneath our fingers.

"What do you want to do?"

*What do you want to do?* she asked. *You're not the one that's dead. Yet.*

"…Meiran…" he whispered.

I watched him. I watched him as he shut his eyes, squeezed them shut before me and his face suddenly showed nothing but pain.

My hand didn't move.

My heart didn't move.

Until his hand moved; turned over so that it dropped the trigger, let it clatter to the floor and grasped mine instead, fingers interlocking with mine and gripping me like a lifeline.

"You are such a *baka*, you damn onna," he said, and at that moment the cotton around my mind froze and shattered and fell away and I heard the tears in his voice.

He opened his eyes, too-bright and still that deep, dark onyx that I would drown in if I wasn't careful

"I know," I told him softly. "It's what I'm best at." I tried to smile.

"That," he said, voice firm and words decisive, "is more true than you'll ever know."

And then there were no more words either of us could say.

Until Duo's radio signal broke through Wufei's jamming frequency.

"-Fei!!! What are you *doing*?!! Why the hell're you just standing there – you'd better be freakin' glad I got here in time to cover your butt or you'd *so* be toast right now, buddy!"

Wufei broke away to lean forward and hit the "call" button.

"If you don't mind, Maxwell, I am a little busy at the moment. Shut up."

And he hit the jamming frequency again.