Chapter 7 – Superabundant



It's not easy to forget, granted. But it'll amaze you how hard is to just push something out of your mind so that you can at least function in the normal world. It amazed me, amazed me how much the object of my infatuation seemed to sit inexhaustible and omnipotent in my brain and watch my scattered, distorted thoughts like a picture show. A picture show as loud and useless as a numbed electric storm. He sat as calmly as he had always lived there and belonged nowhere else, silly. And while he lounges in my brain, I find myself sitting just inches from homegrown insanity and the cold bars of Death's gate always pressed into my back. And meanwhile, the little Ghost Heero sitting in my brain always just smiles with a disarming imp grin. Needless to say, I got absolutely no sleep that night. At least when Solo had died and I had dropped dead asleep from crying.

[[ Come on, Du-chan is it really that bad? ]]

I remember vaguely when Quatre came in on medical watch with his hand scratching at his mussed blonde hair and ever-delightful buttery smile lost somewhere in an extreme case of morning breath. Excuse me, blonde rattrap.

It was sometime before dawn I could gather and probably closer to 4 in the morning than any sane hour of the day, any hour that a sane soul would be sitting bolt up in bed. Well, I was. I'm sure there was some sweet, comforting words and looks one-sidedly exchanged to cheer me up, while making those mundane rounds of fixing up the shot-up American idiot with black bowls hanging beneath his eyes. Quatre is an angel for all he does for everyone, always being so understanding and intelligent about even the direst situations and so patient around the most abrasive, stoic people, even the loud and insensitive ones. But when I looked in to his big naively round blue-green eyes that were like brotherly sugar in the dim pink-gray light, I couldn't say anything. I couldn't tell Quatre, even if he was one of my best friends a fourth of my only family left in the world. In the edges of my vision, I noticed a slip in his sweet smile and a flicker of worry clouding behind his eyes.

But I took my new breakfast bowl of warm chicken noodle and my secret and I held it.

The rest of the day dropped simply from my attention and I moved through it like a grief-stricken toddler lost in a vast empty store with his arms constricted around his teddy bear life-line who has finally run out of tears and just wanders aimlessly. All there is in this particular department store, though, are only old familiar rust-red, moth-pocked sweaters in endless stock and supply and fresh gun magazines lined in atrocious-looking displays 30 magazines tall. Gun magazines scattered across the floor, bullets lodged in the sprawled cashiers' foreheads; tiny emaciated children downed in the aisles, the general sick smell of disease looming.

The day was fading off into a ruby grapefruit-colored sunset, as quickly as if I had stood off from the frantic steady flow of time and resigned myself to watching it through an hourglass. It was frightening how quickly time passed and I wondered dreadfully if my life would always pass me by like this from now on. I wondered dreadfully if I would really care anyway if it did.

I was even expected to go back to school, back to the old dormroom.

You see: Duo Maxwell has been excused because of a sudden family death. Please pardon all absences' only lets you leave for a week, not run from reality for the rest of your life.

I still have a war to fight, and a geometry packet due.

So now, here I am. Like some toothless, blind dog to helpless to leave an abusive, neglecting owner and his baseball bat, I seem to go straight back to where I started. The first brick in this sadist's version of the yellow brick road. I find my gun again in my lap and ritualistically dismantle it, legs crossed indian-style and back pressed against my old cardboard pillow. It really is my old room, I think dimly. In the few days of my absences ( mission night, recovery night ) nothing seems to have changed; it's the same old warrior's den. On the painfully void desk pressed against the empty wall lies the ever-popular laptop, closed and silent and still ready to destroy any corrupt life with a few simple codes. My weapons and knives are still kneaded inconspicuously between the mattresses of my bed on the left and my useless, token textbooks remain in a pile beside and underneath my bed.

My headquarters of sorts.

Heero's side is as it should be expected, dictator-immaculate as always and his faint, soapy clean smell is still hovering around. I could open the bathroom door and find the leather still flopped over the side of the sink.

So. Damn. Homey.

The pink-tinted orange light still glows through the windows over each bed, and the greasy cloth laid across my bed still is smeared oil-black.

Deadened and mechanical and as drained as hell is toasty, I begin to wipe the rag smoothly along the surfaces and boxy curves of the individual parts, each so immensely innocent once alone. Once cleaned, I put my Colt back together. I snap those innocent-looking metal facets back into place and just as calmly as I had finished, I begin again. Dismantle, clean, reassemble. The tiny blue-eyed Ghost Heero in my brain curls up in the fashion of a milk-fed puppy and dozes off quietly.

So I repeat. And again, and again, and again. A strange and oddly morbid and romantic cycle like the great king of Corinth forever condemned to rolling a boulder up a hill, which I was supposed to be researching for my history report anyway. But I was too busy at the moment being pumped full of lead.

I have rapidly dissembled my gun for the ninth time before my dulled senses finally register that the door has been opened to let a faint draft and a certain slim brunette in through the door.

My eyes noiselessly shift upward to the blank wall painted a reddish-pink, a sudden, equally blank pit causing a gap in my numb thunderstorm brain. I can instantly sense Heero standing there, but I can't force myself to feel. Locked in a passive apathy. Still automatically cleaning the gun in a hazy stupor, I let my head inconspicuously drop back down a fraction of an inch and the summery pink floats on silently through the room unhindered. The metallic sounds of my Colt fade out in the blandness of my brain and remain there, until I realize there is a person standing beside me.

I stop.

And the silence begins to descend like cold hands running around my neck; until the nothingness is so loud it's drowning out the sound of the adrenaline burning through my veins. The pale blue comforter is suddenly really remarkable too, and the perfect place to hide my eyes, pretend I don't notice the walking ghost of my dreams standing there. Pretend it's only a cold breeze, a figment of my imagination in the fringes of my sight, one more spark of insanity to fan the flames. Pretend I'm fine and fucking dandy.

But I can't fool myself. And obviously, not Heero, either.

the Japanese pilot asks quietly, still as granite stone in the corner of my peripheral vision as I hunch silently over my array of fully cleaned gun parts. Can I talk to you?

That's when I fiercely shut my eyes and curl up even more tightly into my defensiveness, every slashed heartstring in me straining on its last thread not to explode and drop me dead where I sit. Damn it, I feel so suffocated and stupid. I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him! Solo!

I feel my fists clench up in confusion and frustration clawing to get out and the constant mechanical churning and constricting of my stomach going full-tilt. I feel so twisted up; a wild, sparking cable long since loose from the generator of stability. I feel so damned stupid and the hot salt behind my eyes slowly crawls out. I don't want to hurt him!

The little Ghost Heero in my brain suddenly sits awake, prussian blue eyes bright with concern.

I don't want to hurt anyone anymore!

And suddenly the tiny, beautiful little Ghost Heero disappears with an unceremonious silence and I sense dully the mattress bowing beneath me and my eyes dart up from the cotton candy pink wall to the real Heero who now has his steel-bending arms around my shoulders and my heart just stops.

Duo, it's okay, he says quietly, voice weighted with an age-old sincerity and motherly quiet.

It takes every last atom not slashed to pieces by my inner demons' twisted little games to not burst into pathetic tears before he can finish, my hands clenched tightly around any scrap of his tank's green fabric I can find like it's the last thread of life dangled in front of my nose.

Heero's arms squeeze around my shoulders. I don't think you could kill me if you tried, he whispers.

That's when I think everything came to a point for me, when I felt the absolutely human warm shoulder of the killer hit my cheek and the overwhelming sense of quiet strength normally lost beneath a soldier's face hit me like a truck. That's when I finally realized I really did love him, the dark-haired, blue-eyed killer, and the hidden little boy with the strikingly sad eyes beneath it all who now held me. When the red-stained world and illusions of guns and bloody wounds felt like unimportant coins clattering to the floor, when I cried my fucking eyes out into the fabric of the soldier's tanktop until the pink sky long since had faded off into black, when Heero treated me so humanely it was more powerful than any millimeter bullet between the eyes.

Nothing was going to take him away, this time.

Nothing.






The room was blacker than Shinigami feathers with an instantaneous silencing effect, a sacred quietness I reveled in by myself, sitting in the spartan little chair parked in front of Heero's desk. The place that battles with skillet hot air hissing in your ears and thermal blasts tearing at the torn-up landscape around you relentlessly were decided with a few taps on a keyboard, the place that I had watched the Japanese pilot seemingly grow colder and more distant with each line of precise clicking. It was mine for the moment, as the night grew deeper and deeper past midnight. The tattered little mouse beneath my hand was cold and tinny, uttering little complaining rusty clacks as I dragged it relentlessly back and forth, chewing through the silent libraries of information I'd hunted up, chewing quietly, determinedly, for my final piece of peace. My closure for the green-eyes always smiling in the unforgotten corner of my mind.

The dry, bone-white glare of the computer screen cut at my eyes until the inky dark lines and lines and lines and lines up on lines of names began to roll out before me like a thousand curls of black hair.

The blackness surrounding me was as quiet as a grave, I could feel Heero's presence still hovering patiently from somewhere behind me, and all of a sudden, it was there. The demons tailing me from my childhood, snapping at my ankles through the ashes of the Maxwell church and laughing at the corpse of Sister Helen laid down in front of me, slinking ever so faithfully behind me with the malcontent and ill-will of the devil himself, died. In an instant.

Halfway down the page, the thirteenth line from the top of the screen, between thousands of other anonymous forgotten names, lay the name of my green-eyed beloved brother, Solomon Michaels. Died 185 AC, 89RT-B infection.

And for the first time, it took no effort for a truly happy smile to take over my face. No Shinigami grin to hide the Shinigami fear of death and fear of causing death lurking like boils beneath it. I felt completed.

[[[ R.I.P. ]]]

A few moments later, after shutting off the humming computer in need of a well-deserved rest, I slowly turned in the chair, my arm slung over the side. The black I'd grown accustomed to, that sacred quietness saved only for the atmosphere of a hero's funeral, slowly began to fade into a dim, dark blue and I smiled as I saw the ever-patient teenage soldier sitting on the bed, his disheveled brown hair tilted with the comedy of a curious terrier.

With one last deep breath, I left the past behind on a barren dormitory desk and returned to the present; I left the chair and I quietly walked over to the blue-eyed Japanese boy, smiling down at him. Half-startled-innocence, half-quiet-nervousness, Heero replied only in quiet, staring back up at me with his fingers constantly knotting themselves into sixteen different varieties of apprehensive knots. He thought I couldn't see him fidget.

God, I couldn't help but to smile.

The Japanese boy eyes followed like frantic magnets as I quietly pulled the Colt from its half-cocked position in my pocket and put it nonchalantly onto the table. Like it was no big deal to come to grips with Death. And again I grin.

In one last motion, I found the strength to leave the ghost of Solo in peace who had for too long been forced to haunt my brain, a last misty chain of my childhood rattling in my brain and lingering long after I had released the ghosts of my long-since dead parents and the eternally benign memories of Sister Helen and Father Maxwell. In the dark, my lips stretched into an impish ply and I leaned down with the fluid chestnut blur of my braid swinging down from my shoulder.

The unnerved wringing of Heero's thin piano hands froze like a startled kitten under mine, warm and as tense as a slab of heated steel being bent by bare human strength. I watched his now very skittish blue eyes flicker to my face with the most amount of amusement you could imagine without becoming a dangerously masochistic pervert, and grinned once again. 'Night, Heero. And just as the telltale glow of pink clouded just above his cheekbones, I dove in and tasted something much better than garbage soufflé, leaving an innocent lingering kiss on the blue-eyed boy's lips.

Well, garbage soufflé still can get second place if it wants.

Fin.

[[[ Thank you all so much for your support! ]]]