Disclaimer - I do not own Gundam Wing, yada yada.
Well then, I started this story a long time ago, but got distracted (Damn you ADD, damn you.) and decided to start it back up. I was unhappy with the first chapter, I felt I rushed things way too much, I realize this replacement chapter is probably much shorter, but a better read.
I hope to make a decent story out of this, but we'll see.
So here's the re-written Chapter 1 of Stitches, and with any luck there might acctually be a second and third coming.
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Consciousness came back to me slowly, came back to me painfully, I fought the agony I knew awaited me with what little strength I had left. I had no wish to be awake, in fact I dare say I feared being awake; there were no uncertainties in my sleep, there was nothing I hadn't faced a thousand times over, there were no new demons awaiting me there. So I rebelled, I lashed out against my body's increasing alertness, I tried my damnedest to sink back into the oblivion from whence I came, but as with everything in my short and utterly pointless life: I failed.
Vaguely I became aware of pain, it was steadily increasing with my wakefulness, and with it I felt my mind recoiling. It wasn't that I was unaccustomed to pain, on the contrary pain was one of the few things I could call a stability in my existence, it was the only thing that had never abandoned me.
They didn't abandon you, you know. No, no you abandoned them. A birthday card and a Teddy Bear to make everything better, then you just walked away.
There it was again, the other mainstay in my life, my undeniable insanity. I wondered wryly if there were even medical labels for the things that went on inside of my head, I figured there probably were but in a life where you've got very little to truly call your own, there's a small note of twisted pride in believing you've birthed your own set of unique "diseases." A small part of my mind laughed at this notion, as I was once the great soldier, I owned a machine that held the balance of life and death inside it's gundanium hands. I owned a piece of death itself, as Duo Maxwell might say.
Duo...
I sighed audibly at the thought of the braided man, how long had it been since I seen him? I didn't know, I couldn't remember the last time that I'd known the date or even the time of day; it felt like years and for all I honestly knew it could have been that and so much more. I wondered silently if he thought about me from time to time, I doubted it really, I was never particularly close with any of the other pilots. Still there was no denying the fact that of all the people I encountered during the war or my entire life for that matter, Duo Maxwell, the self proclaimed God of Death, was the closest thing I ever had to a friend. A thought that elicited another long and drawn out sigh, a motion that sent my lungs into a screaming fury, I decided miserably that either my ribs were broken or someone ripped open my chest, pissed in my lungs, and sewed me back up in my sleep. Logic told me the former, but the fact that I really had no idea where the hell I was inside my own house gave the latter chilling levels of realism.
So I did what seemed like the best idea at the time, I opted to ignore what felt like a punctured lung and prepared myself for the motions of getting out of whatever bed I had woken up in, taking a nice long piss, and ransacking my house until I found some sort of drug or alcoholic beverage that would numb my body.
Ah yes, one more trip to the liquor cabinate. One more day spent running from your life, one more cowards way out.
"Shut the fuck up." I mumbled at myself, feeling that it was far to early to be having yet another argument with this empty house. I rolled sluggishly over to the edge of my bed and immediately regretted it, what was before just the ever present dull ache resonating through my body quickly turned into an intense and blinding agony coursing through every single one of my limbs. I had put just enough muscle behind the roll to get me to the edge of the bed, however not expecting the assault on my senses I was no longer ready to roll my feet onto the floor and stumble my way from there. With a sickening thud my malnourished body landed on the mahogany floor, increasing the pains I was feeling ten-fold, I let out a pained groan that easily border-lined the "tortured scream" level, and fought against the nausea that was rising in my stomach.
Unsurprisingly, I failed.
My stomach lurched and tried to heave up contents that weren't there, I wondered distantly when the last time I had eaten was and decided it had likely been days or weeks, I heaved over and over and felt the burning in my muscles increase with each motion, finally I succumbed to the agony and let myself slip back into the only place I felt safe.
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So there you have it, hope you enjoyed it. Review if you want to, if not, suits me just as well.
