Title: The Forsworn ~ Stirring (12)

Author: Sita Seraph

Genre: Angst?  Supernatural?

Pairing: Unknown

Rated: R

Warning: Suicide, angst, depression

Summary: When love gets out of hand, out of control, and out of mind – where beliefs are lies.  This will be Heero's last chance.

I was never an outcast before.  I couldn't be; I was too vitally important for missions and with my sensitivity to everything around me, there was no way I couldn't be part of the group.  Yet, here I was, rejected from Trowa and Heero's experience.  Not only would they no longer speak of the matter, but I also couldn't get in.  It was like Duo's magic had seeped into them; Duo was like a blank wall to my reach.  I would brush nothing; there was no feeling, no warmth.  It was like empty air, hovering, and hovering, and just waiting to be cracked.  And now they were just the same.

Heero had been very quiet the past few days.  He didn't talk to anyone and his thoughts reached such a depth that they made me dizzy.  When I tried to reach out to him, I would always get something back that was cold and numbing.  His emotions were frozen to me, blocked off by some surreal force that invaded all my doings.  And he was so open before.  His thoughts were so easily displayed on his face, the daydreaming look in his eyes so freely shone. But it seemed, lately, that those dreams had died.  Broken, into a million little pieces, and the shards laid scattered around Heero's red-rimmed eyes.  If he had been crying, I didn't know.  If he wasn't sleeping, I couldn't tell.  He was so far away from me.  His hair was even more straggly then ever before, as he stopped taking up the habit of combing his hair.  His shirts were always dirty, sagging on his muscled body and his pants were too big for him, always dragging at his feet that he constantly tried to pull up around his hips.

Trowa, I knew, seemed to be blaming himself for something.  What he dreamt, or maybe saw in Duo, seemed to…change him somehow.  He seemed more aware, more awake, than I can recall.  He wasn't jumpy at every noise, but he seemed to know what was going on all the time now.  He was acting more cautious about my feelings now, but also became more distant from me than ever before. He never spoke to Heero about what they saw.  They never said anything to each other the whole week.  Trowa didn't sleep as much but I guess this was okay for the most part.  He started to read a lot, as if trying to catch Wufei's habit of knowledge, but sometimes I got a strange feeling that he was looking for something in the library.  Searching page after page for some answer of what happened to him perhaps…

It was a beautiful morning.  I was seated on the window seat, leaning against Trowa's arm, that he had wrapped around my neck.  His fingers were playing with one of my shorter blonde strands, thumb and pointer finger massaging the hair caught between the two digits.  I had opened the window wider with the little knob, letting fresh, dewed morning air drift into the stuffy house.  Of course, the air cooling my slightly damp forehead wasn't real, but it was easy to pretend.  L4 was a beautiful place to live in, not as hectic and un-orderly as L1 and L2 were.

Heero was off on love seat against the wall, reading with unseeing eyes of a book he had pulled randomly off the shelf on the other side of the room.  I wondered if he was even reading the words on the pages or simply scanning them, as if looking for some sort of information.  Or maybe not even seeing it at all, instead being in some sort of daydream that didn't reach his eyes.  It was hard to tell.  It was so hard to tell anything anymore.  My ability was completely useless.  First Wufei, then Duo, now them.  It was hardly fair that I was completely left in the dark part in all of this. But everything was so far-fetched.  How could Trowa be 'in' Duo's mind?  How could Heero follow him?  Impossible; simply impossible.

Maybe that was the reason why Trowa distanced himself from me.  Because I didn't believe his story.  But who could?  Could you honestly think someone in a coma could reach out and drag someone in with them?  It wasn't mentally possible.  But then again, this heart of mine wasn't possible either.

I was ten when it happened.  I was outside, reading an old classic novel that my father insisted upon me.  It was so hot outside; I could feel the burn on my skin, the heat from the concrete underneath my chair.  The ice from my ice tea had melted long ago, the fresh cut lemon dreary and wilting against the sun's hot rays.  Sweat coated my forehead and neck and it felt so wonderful to feel whenever the wind picked up.  I had looked up when I turned the page of my book and I decided that I would go inside to finish the novel.  As I stood up and shifted my swimming trunks, I felt suddenly dizzy.  As if I was falling.  Like when I spun in my father's chair so fast I had to find something solid and close to look at so I wouldn't get sick; when I would raise my hands into the air and literally feel the gravity around me, pushing my arms the opposite direction of the spinning.  I felt that gravity then, weighing me down so hard and fast I didn't have time to comprehend, let alone fight back.  I remember the biting pain as my knees sank to the ground too fast, too hard.  I tried to breathe, tried to blink away all the blurs caving in all around me.  I remember falling back; I couldn't hear anything but my breathing.  Hard, breathless, dying, desperate gasps of air that wouldn't fill my closed off lungs.  I wheezed and choked, my hand flying hopelessly up towards the sky to catch my fall.  But gravity pushed me down with all its force, my back slamming into the chair until both it and I were forced out of the way.  I collapsed, my head bouncing off the pavement, as I couldn't stop the fall.  Pant.  Pant.  Pant.  It was all I could hear.  The desperate rasp clogging up in my throat.  And then came the pain right in the middle of my chest.  I arched up, air hissing inwardly as I could not scream.  The pain went from my chest and slammed hard into my brain.  It was all I could feel.  All I could hear now.  And then, it was so bad that it went away.  It just stopped and what I felt, saw, or heard was nothing.

Nothing.

I was out in the sun for one hour before someone found me.  I had extensive burns since I didn't put on any sun block.  But that was insignificant.  My heart had stopped.  My brain no longer operated.  I was nothing for a day, a corpse.  It was what I remembered – a blackness, so whole and complete.  I wasn't scared; I wasn't anything.  I was apart of it.  I breathed with it.  It was like a life; a life I joined unwillingly.  I moved with it, I was one with it, I was everything around me.  I didn't feel anything.  I really didn't know anything.  I was just this hole, forgetting everything about Quatre Winner, not even remembering I had a body.  It was like returning to something I went away from, becoming apart of something much bigger.

And then, suddenly, I was torn away.

Then, only then, was fear and pain.  Fear of losing something, fear of the unknown, fear of returning to something that was in the distance, something I was a part of once but didn't want to any longer.  I was back in a constricting body, no longer able to freely move, to be part of something much larger.  I was incompetent again; a little boy who had a bad heart, a heart too large and couldn't pump his blood fast enough.  I cried then on my hospital bed against the pain and fear.  I lost something and I couldn't have it back.

I was wrong, though.

I felt it still.  That darkness, somewhere deep in my chest.  A hole right in the middle that sucked in everything around me.  The emotions, the expressions, the knowledge.  I knew where my family was, waiting outside and talking to the doctor, without being told.  I felt their grief through the walls.  I was horrified, overwhelmed by this combined energy of sorrow that was drawn in…into this tiny hole that couldn't accept such a large weight.  I couldn't breathe again.  I was choking on it all, so heavy…that sometimes I wake up in the middle of night and still feel it.  That ache that tried to kill my new heart.  The pain that brought tears streaming down my face.  The agony that suffocated my whole being, saturating it with misery. I couldn't breathe!  I couldn't breathe…

"Quatre?"

I turned around quickly, clutching my painful chest.  It throbbed lightly, beating slightly in pain by the refreshed memory.  Trowa was watching me with concern but it was distant in his gaze.  I knew he was worried but it was like all his emotions were being drawn right into the center of his being and mashed all together into a little ball, so I couldn't see it anymore in his gaze.  So I couldn't know what he felt through all that darkness blocking my path.

"Yes?" I said weakly, turning my head back out the window.  The ache was slowly easing away, more so because I felt I was losing a piece of me that had beautiful green eyes, but I didn't remove the hand from my chest.

"Did you feel something?" He asked and my chest constricted painfully another time.  I took a moment to let it surpass.

"If I did?"

"Then there'd would be hope," he answered.

"Only hope in my memories, Trowa," I said sulkily, drawing away from his arms and getting up.  This wasn't right.  The pain should have gone now.

"Are you sure?" He asked.

"I-." My hand fell away from my heart and I clutched my arm that throbbed lightly with pain.  I stared at it, finding my knees weakening.  Then, again, harder.  I fell against the wall, mouth open in a silent cry.  This wasn't right!  The pain should have gone!

"Oh," I finally managed out.  Trowa stood up and put a hand on my shoulder.

"Quatre," he called.

I couldn't answer him.  My mouth was suddenly chalky, cracking.  I coughed, trying to clear it from the rust I felt inside.  It was like I hadn't talked in ages.  I was losing my voice.  I coughed harder.

"Quatre, take a seat," Trowa instructed, pushing me back down onto the window seat.  "Heero, call a doctor.  I think Quatre is having trouble with his heart again."

Not again…

"I'm-fine," I said, shaking my head as my hand shakily clasped onto my parched throat.  "It-It's not me."

"Not you?" Trowa questioned.  "What do you mean not you?"

The phone was ringing.  Quatre lifted his stinging his eyes, closing them briefly – they felt so dry.  So…dry…

"Hello?" Heero said across the room as he picked up the phone.

There was a pause.  More, dreadful silence that dragged on and forced Quatre's eyes open, desperately trying to soothe his parched throat. He glanced over at 01.

And he was shaking.

And Quatre knew why.

Quatre stared at Heero, eyes suddenly brimming with tears.  He knew why Heero's hand couldn't stop shaking, even when he tried to grip the phone with both hands.  He knew why Heero collapsed into the nearest seat, leaning forward as he tried to listen to the person on the phone…and tried to stop from crying.  He knew why.  He knew why even before Heero hung up the phone with a curt 'good bye' and he looked at his fellow friends.

"Duo's awake," he said.