Disclaimer: Usual applies.
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Relena left a note at the hotel for her mother and notified her team she was going. (The hotel offered services that sent out telegrams to its guests: they arrived at the recipient's door via a maid). Though there was no use in having it Relena wore a lightweight coat, if only to promote a feeling of inconspicuousness in public.
Once she stepped outside Relena felt unusually self-conscious - smoothing the collar of her coat with one hand, she smiled at the valet and walked across the corad.
A vendor at the corner of the street sold pastries and juice: she bragged about the origins of the type Relena bought.
"Mango-papaya, after all, is only grown on three local moon farms so far - but the owner keeps reasonable prices, and you can believe my customers love the results! Mr. Gram's a bit of a genius, really - hybrids of tropical fruits are his specialty: other than mango-papaya, he also has an apple-pear hybrid and - oh, he's working on a pomegranate-coconut plant! Imagine that!"
"Imagine that." Relena echoed, smiling.
The streets were wide with slots set in the curb that led tot he sewers. Bulbous containers standing to her hips acted as automatic trash bins, organized by color - green for colored glass, red for paper, etc. Relena passed a school - dark stone and large, white-rimmed windows reflecting the sun overhead - and let her fingers drum against the ars of the fence surrounding it. The sounds it made were thick and short, dnng-dnng-dnng. Farther down she came across a busier section of the city, all the bulidings held offices and boutiques, quiet stores and riotous services. Relena threw the large plastic cup which had held her juice into a blue trash can that promptly whirred as it worked the plastic. (Mango-papaya, hmm...).
A public transport shuttle passed her by and saw it stop up ahead. A crookedly-shaped old lady hobbled up the ramp that unfolded for her. Relena headed for the travel information posted on the bench of the shuttle stop and studied the schedule.
"Jules Drape Memorial Gardne (AC 192): open 7 AM to 7:30 PM". The next shuttle in the direction of the Drape Memorial was in fifteen minutes. Relena considered this...glanced over her shoulder...then at her watch...tapped her wrist with one finger, an impatient expression spreading over face at her own indecisiveness...she looked through her pockets...felt change in the bottom of her coat pocket....tapped her foot, glanced at her watch again...curled her fingers around the money warming in her hand...
Dinner was at seven. She'd be back long before. And who knew when she would be able to get out like this again. So, Relena stepped up on the next shuttle bus.
This early in the year the Drape Memorial already had flowers in full bloom. A comination of the intensity of sunlight in space, the type of soil and bioengineering made these flowers capable of blooming as often as three times a year. Relena lost hersel in the shrubbery, a forest of colors. Though the garden lacked all the usual animal life, well-cared for butterflies lifted off flowers at face level with Relena, their heads bobbing - it seemed almost a cheerful greeting, their petals waving stiffly when the insects rose from them.
She thought she had read about a bird conservatory in the city, too - it's specialty, she recalled, lay in raising hummingbirds.
"It's so quiet." Relena murmured. Spying a bench she settled onto it, surrounded on three sides by flowers her height when standing.
It felt as though her thoughts were unraveling, right there - being still caused it. She had alot to look forward to - and curious questions abounded that needed answering, some direction. Unmercifully her mind turned towards politics. The next elections were a year away - this time around she would have to go about it the old-fashioned way, campaigning, spending money, traveling. The rushed affair leading to her position after the war would become part of the past, the conditions surrounding her position in office being unique. She remembered those unusual days, a little after the war had ended - the standard practices had been completely foregone when she took up the job, they needed someone that badly. She was still filled with the same purpose and intent and sense of will as then, to be sure, but things had changed already. She needed to prepare herself. This time, there was no desperation that would boot her into power - she would have to go against real opponents, people with twenty year's worth of interspacial-relations experience.
She lived a highly competitive life now. There were many who would prefer her to leave the ring for reasons other than that her father was the politician he was, his assassination, and her general popularity - she was younger than any had been when they entered politics; she was a woman, a girl, really; she could influence the people of Earth as well the colonies, which no one else could and which kept her, if nothing else did, firmly rooted in her position. She was a league unto herself. Her youth simply mirrored her vitality; the idealism and self-righteousness that lent a crisp edge to her character impressed on others a vision of seriousness, maturity and foresight.
After the intense confusion the war had caused - soldiers dying, citizens dying, life in space nearly caving in, economical ruin, and political chaos starting and ending with Treize Kushrenada, and initially, the first Heero Yuy - Relena Darlian was a needed breath of fresh air. But where was her place in all this? Was a seventeen-year-old girl to lead civilization to peace on her own? Who did she have with her to act as the backbone of a body to which she was the heart? When would the fresh-faced politician wilt, as all politicians did, earlier than most. Would the opposition she faced be too great a climb? Would her apparent determination and obstinate nature overtake her? (That question, not her own, was a stanger bumping shoulders with the familiar thoughts in her head. It was a curiosity). After all, with youth came naivete - that idealist nature of her's acted as sure prove of that, right? (The stranger brought a friend to rub shoulders with, then). Were people even ready? God knew everyone felt they were, but a knowing mind is always squinting to see better.
Then there was the age factor. In many ways, she was too young to be nominated for her party. Legal restrictions demanded a person be twenty-three to run for positions in government, and she was not even seventeen yet. Unofficially, a full college education was expected from nominees (and, really, almost everyone involved in campaigning). She was already reporting to other diplomats as a way for others to keep tabs on her - she would meet with them monthly to discuss her aims, intentions, even her speeches, etc. Some of these people held a lesser rank than her, which obsured their motives in dealing with the Representative of Earth, Relena Darlian. She sometimes had the impression they reacted jealously to her work,which she found very unfortunate. Her objectives were constantly misconstrued, a result of her catapaulting journey to fame. Though only a true politician in the last few months, Relena had gained greatly experience. She understood that, no matter the state of Cinq's economy, over which she exercised the control a nation's figurehead may hold, and no matter the conditions between the colonies and Earth, the source of the greastest of her worries, she needed to complete her education. to work in the full sphere her position demanded of her. To grow into the changing politics of her day Relena found it an unsaid requirement that she finish her education.
But the time that required...Relena sank her chin into the dip of her curved hand. She would graduate from undergraduate school in AC 200, and if she decided to go for a master's degree, she wouldn't see the end of school until AC 204. If she started now - as she knew she could - she would be twenty-five when she finally graduated. She was not sure she could stay out that long - the reams of some obligation only partly known to her now filled her gut. She could not just drop everything for something as comparatively petty as that (perhaps an exaggeration on her part). This was rather self-righteous to think, but people needed her, she had her father's shoes to fill, a gap in history was her's to complete. The idealist in her ran screaming through her head at the thought of quitting politics, even if it were only a temporary lapse in the politics Relena gave so much to, expected so much of!
Her head had begun to hurt, a dull, slow ache lurking in the eyesockets. The garden's heady smell came close to being nauseating but Relena forced the feeling out of her system. She wanted to stay, it was so pretty. Besides, she had not really eaten anything in the past four hours, there was nothing retching would help.
The continuous unraveling of her thoughts continued.
That she was a woman in a game still dominated by men played against her as well. As much as she disliked it, the truth was that most men on her playing field saw her as more of a threat than she really was (or, perhaps not - perhaps they're evaluation of her as an immediate threat was accurate. Only time would tell). As the figurehead of Romaefeller earlier, she had taken on more than the other heads of Romaefeller had wanted her to. She became what she represented, which no one had planned, least of all expected. It irritated them - at first, they reacted treating her as one would a rash would, then as a deteriorating disease. That she had kept at it this long and this successfully irked a great many that said little to that effect - always, always she had to keep an eye out for one of those. Looking over her shoulder was beginning to become a reflex.
Another idea pushed into the crowded party pulsing in Relena's brain. It brought her to the subject of everyone only indirectly involved with the war - the primary victims, the people outside of the army and the government, the middle and lower classes, blue collar workers. She was something unique to them for other reasons than she was useful to the ESUN, or her own team. The people she worked with had been eye-witnesses to some part of the war - it had been rather hard to escape, as she found out herself - and therefore she held a special connection with them.
The people to whom she was appealing to saw her in a different light - the reason she felt she sometimes played a role rather than be herself in front of an audience was that they saw a different person there. In their eyes, she was the martyr that hadn't died, the prophet that spoke ahead of schedule. Her age made a winsome impression on those crowds who considered her youth both unusual and adorable. They could take her seriously without being reminded of rank blood, that uncle missing in action, the after-effects of government rationing. That she had to work under so many restrictions - not half of them officially known, but it was accurately guessed that she worked under special conditions - somehow charmed the masses, ensured them of her mortality. They even saw the act of her immediate education put on hold as a direct sacrifice and this boosted morale!
It was weird that everything that could hold her back in the future now counted for her. What was personally not so good for her appealed to a crowd - appealed to the self-absorbed, selfish, grubbing parts of people that could sometimes put a person out of politics forever under the influence of circumstantial evidence alone!
She was getting ahead of herself and her head was near bursting. This thought turned out a little louder than the rest and reigned over the hum in her skull.
The war that these people had seen, the people that voted for her!, was a different one from the one Relena had been involved in. Granted, she had seen an unsual, downright eccentric side of war - an estranged brother, Gundam pilots that some people now said had not even existed but were pure gossip created by the gaps in records detailing the past year - she had argued with Treize Kushrenada on multiple occations, survived an encounter with Heero's former trainer - a man who, even then, barely after turning fifteen, Relena felt she'd rather not be alone with.....all this, this huge mountain of unsorted data, made her wonder at people's sincerity and eagerness when they declared themselves for her cause. How could they know? They hadn't been through what she had. That war had created a moat around her, disconnecting her from what was popular thought. An island in the middle of hilly land. Of course, she would not wish her experiences on them, just as she'd rather not know the specifics of their past experiences either. But she worried that someday, someone would ask her, and at her response wonder from what angle she came from as this certainly was not what they were expecting. Oh, expectations - would she ever live up to the half of them that were important enough? There were so many things she could worry about without reusing the worry from the day before - new day, new worry. (She didn't really like this idea, though, and it disappeared as quickly as it had come about).
All the same, this must have been something like what her father experienced. Relena cocked her head to the side, completely unaware of her surroundings now, the image of her father fresh in her mind. He had been relatively young when he started his political career at twenty-two, first as part of a major campaign - he helped write the speeches. To hear her father speak the result of writing speeches was quite different than from what he had imagined for himself. By then, he had parted from the background machinery making up a campaign and joined the front ranks, beside the man he used to write one-third of his words for - Heero Yuy. Heero Yuy introduced him to the heavy work that became her father's life, shuttling across space everywhere, gaining all kinds of connections. Relena's father, by then, realized he had picked the path he would take for the rest of his life. It was a sobering notion.
At Heero Yuy's assassination in AC 180 her father held his own career and had formed an alliance with important business men, as a politician's biggest adversary remained the merchant. One of these was Mr. Winner, head of the Winner family. On a side note, he was one of the first people to become introduced to the youngest of Mr. Winner's children, and the only child not born of a test-tube - Quatre Raberba Winner.
He met Relena's mother not two years later - in AC 184 they were married. And according to the timeline forming her past, Cinq fell in AC 185, bringing her to stay permanently with the newly-weds as their five-year-old child. A coppery taste bloomed in her mouth as Relena chewed on the inside of her bottom lip, this summary of her life particularly fascinating to her because it seemed so very planned-out, as though someone had traced her life's general path through all the occurences of her late father's.
It certainly didn't feel like this path was marked all that much by her true bloodline, the Peacecraft family. She possessed that name like one who hoards their jewels in a safe - by keeping it out of sight it was still her's to contemplate, if not to mimick. She was a Peacecraft but also a second-generation politician of the Darlian line. It was really what she wanted.
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Heero stomped up the last of the steps, turning sharply into an empty, gray corridor with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. An empty canvas bag hung over one wrist poking out of his pant pocket; each step echoed in the cement corridor. He advanced to the next set of staircases at the end of the hall - halfway up those he would be at his door. The one-bedroom flat he now rented by the week sat at the top of an apartment complex, the small bathroom missing some tiling and the kitchen microwave with its own quirky personality; a large window opened his bedroom up to the neighborhod he had washed up in, its dingy, unloving atmosphere.
A staggering sound came from behind; he turned, frozen in midstride. An old man pushed his way past the door Heero had just come from, one hand on the doorframe to steady the sway in his step. When he looked up Heero found himself locking gazes with the cloudy-green eyes of a papery-skinned retiree, the bagginess of his shirt emphasizing his thin-shouldered frame and the prominence of his adam's apple, his thick-soled sandals displaying knobby feet and yellowing, tiny toe nails. The old man cocked his head at Heero, a distrustful expression thickening the pea-soup green of his eyes.
"Who the hell are you?" He blustered. He had a scratchy, goat-like quality to his voice, as though he yodeled under his breath while he spoke. Apparently, he expected an answer to his query, his eyes flitting over Heero throughout.
"I'm a new renter." Heero motioned with his head to the door halfway up the next staircase. "Over there."
"Alright." The old man chewed the inside of his cheek, pushing his bottom lip forward. "In that case, help me with this crap here." Heero's eyes focused on a few lumpy shapes in the doorway behind the old man. The old man seemed maddened by his lack of movement. "Either say you've got a lay coming on or get moving! Hell, don't be troublesome." Heero turned around and they eyed each other, each weighing their growing dislike and indifference toward the other, asking whether the feeling was really worth the effort.
"Alright, you demanding old bag." Heero reiterated. "I'll help you. What do you have over there?"
"None of your fucking business - just some things I need to get to the roof." The old man turned back and grabbed one of the lumps - he pulled it along the ground, a coarse, lumpy sack smelling of rotting potatos. Heero went back and grabbed the remaining two, each reaching from his hip to the ground and very compact. With the old man leading the way they passed Heero's door; at the top of the staircase the old man took out some keys and undid the locks holding together some chains barring the door. With a sniff in Heero's direction the old man quickly pocketed the keys in the depths of his vest. Heero could feel his eyes glaring at him indifferently out the back of his head.
Air rushed through Heero's hair and the smell of the sacks in his hands left him, blowing behind him down the hall. The old man pushed forward again, heading for a small makeshift shack to the right. The roof had a view little different from the one he got in the morning; a spread of buildings in earthy tones, all sizes, and a ring of green at the far outer edge that joined with the sky in a haze of aqua at the horizon. The old man forced the door of the shack open and deposited his booty inside - he gestured for Heero to do the same.
"Good. That's all." The old man dismissed him with the wave of a hand.
But Heero had spied something interesting just behind the door leading back into the building. The door rose up from the otherwise flat surface of the roof near the end of it; the shack was squeezed into one corner, leaving all the rest behind the door an empty lot. In this the old man had erected a solid-looking greenhouse. The various shades of green were startling against the brown-gray backgrop provided by the city and Heero was forced to stare outright. The old man stared at him with eyebrows that had sunk over his eyes, meeting in the middle to form a gray, bristling line of long hairs.
Heero brought his stare back and down at the old man, who he towered over by a head in height.
"How'd you get galvanized metal piping for the joints?" The old man seemed quite taken aback by the brusque manner of the question. He considered Heero with a wrinkle of his chin as he folded his bottom lip over the upper.
"Friends of friends." He claimed, thrusting his chest out. Heero jeered at him, his lips forming an unkind grin.
Heero approached the greenhouse until he was close enough to inspect the plants. This made the old man nervous as he kept to Heero's side, continuously chewing on the inside of his cheek.
"Man, watch what you're - "
"Did you get this out of a shipment of nails from Earth?"
The old man sputtered.
"I'd rather not say." He murmured, bristling.
"Don't worry, I won't say anything."
"Really." The old man resumed biting the lining of his cheek. "I don't see how you'd understand, man. You look fresh."
"I'm not."
"You look it, all quiet and young." The old man paused, nodding softly as though agreeing with himself on something. "Yeah, like a student, or something." He knocked his fingertips against the glass of the greenhouse reassuringly. "This, though - 'been my only reason to stay on this fucking trash heap." He kept his eyes level, staring at the greenhouse. "But I couldn't expect you to understand."
They began a halting conversation, not quite focusing on anything, in the perimeters which the old man set for Heero - Heero, the young, unknowing busybody, and the old man, a seasoned, crabby personage used to inconsistent human contact. The greenhouse was what kept Heero's attention but the old man never cared to explain it - a greenhouse in the middle of a city where all the things needed to keep it up were short at hand. Heero could see his reflection in the glass walls if he tried to and he could not see what the old man did, the untried, expectant scholar. Worse - he could see all that was wrong with him this way, with the old man talking on and on about things that had nothing to do with what he said, as though what the old man needed most was an impersonal connection. Well, he had it, this was just about as impersonal as it could get.
What did the old man see? What of Heero expressed scholarliness, newness? There was nothing of the sort present in Heero, not even to the onlooker - he felt more like a piece of fruit bruised and only telling of its bruises by the overripe smell it gives off.
"You're a bad judge of character, ojji." The old man looked startle - he had been talking about a newspaper line he was particularly disgusted with when Heero interrupted him. Then he nodded.
"Generally." Crossing his arms, he continued, "I've always seen what I first see. And now I'm past seventy, people let me do that." Pause. "I'm Cloke - this is Grenja." He patted the glass wall of the greenhouse. Heero felt his eyebrows rise.
"Grenja?"
"Yeah." The old man - Cloke - sounded gruff. "Grenja."
Heero stared Grenja up and down before introducing himself to this new neighbor, Cloke, and Grenja, the greenhouse.
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First of all, that I gave Relena such a detailed past - though it corresponds (I'm pretty sure) with the dates given in the series, everything is up to personal interpretation. I never liked it when the author included some hard to believe or make-believe account of a character's life or history, it made the story harder to believe. This was necessary, though, as Relena's entire past will have something to do with the outcome of this fic and I needed to include it to make everything consistent. In other words, you are welcome to refuse every detail or not - I'm not here to force my version of events on anyone. My main hope is that I remain consistent with the character's personality as seen in the series.
Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm, it's really appreciated. I hope you continue to enjoy this fic. ^ ^
(PS: Keep your eyes open for a new story of mine, 'Clay Antlers' - it's a surprise).
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Relena left a note at the hotel for her mother and notified her team she was going. (The hotel offered services that sent out telegrams to its guests: they arrived at the recipient's door via a maid). Though there was no use in having it Relena wore a lightweight coat, if only to promote a feeling of inconspicuousness in public.
Once she stepped outside Relena felt unusually self-conscious - smoothing the collar of her coat with one hand, she smiled at the valet and walked across the corad.
A vendor at the corner of the street sold pastries and juice: she bragged about the origins of the type Relena bought.
"Mango-papaya, after all, is only grown on three local moon farms so far - but the owner keeps reasonable prices, and you can believe my customers love the results! Mr. Gram's a bit of a genius, really - hybrids of tropical fruits are his specialty: other than mango-papaya, he also has an apple-pear hybrid and - oh, he's working on a pomegranate-coconut plant! Imagine that!"
"Imagine that." Relena echoed, smiling.
The streets were wide with slots set in the curb that led tot he sewers. Bulbous containers standing to her hips acted as automatic trash bins, organized by color - green for colored glass, red for paper, etc. Relena passed a school - dark stone and large, white-rimmed windows reflecting the sun overhead - and let her fingers drum against the ars of the fence surrounding it. The sounds it made were thick and short, dnng-dnng-dnng. Farther down she came across a busier section of the city, all the bulidings held offices and boutiques, quiet stores and riotous services. Relena threw the large plastic cup which had held her juice into a blue trash can that promptly whirred as it worked the plastic. (Mango-papaya, hmm...).
A public transport shuttle passed her by and saw it stop up ahead. A crookedly-shaped old lady hobbled up the ramp that unfolded for her. Relena headed for the travel information posted on the bench of the shuttle stop and studied the schedule.
"Jules Drape Memorial Gardne (AC 192): open 7 AM to 7:30 PM". The next shuttle in the direction of the Drape Memorial was in fifteen minutes. Relena considered this...glanced over her shoulder...then at her watch...tapped her wrist with one finger, an impatient expression spreading over face at her own indecisiveness...she looked through her pockets...felt change in the bottom of her coat pocket....tapped her foot, glanced at her watch again...curled her fingers around the money warming in her hand...
Dinner was at seven. She'd be back long before. And who knew when she would be able to get out like this again. So, Relena stepped up on the next shuttle bus.
This early in the year the Drape Memorial already had flowers in full bloom. A comination of the intensity of sunlight in space, the type of soil and bioengineering made these flowers capable of blooming as often as three times a year. Relena lost hersel in the shrubbery, a forest of colors. Though the garden lacked all the usual animal life, well-cared for butterflies lifted off flowers at face level with Relena, their heads bobbing - it seemed almost a cheerful greeting, their petals waving stiffly when the insects rose from them.
She thought she had read about a bird conservatory in the city, too - it's specialty, she recalled, lay in raising hummingbirds.
"It's so quiet." Relena murmured. Spying a bench she settled onto it, surrounded on three sides by flowers her height when standing.
It felt as though her thoughts were unraveling, right there - being still caused it. She had alot to look forward to - and curious questions abounded that needed answering, some direction. Unmercifully her mind turned towards politics. The next elections were a year away - this time around she would have to go about it the old-fashioned way, campaigning, spending money, traveling. The rushed affair leading to her position after the war would become part of the past, the conditions surrounding her position in office being unique. She remembered those unusual days, a little after the war had ended - the standard practices had been completely foregone when she took up the job, they needed someone that badly. She was still filled with the same purpose and intent and sense of will as then, to be sure, but things had changed already. She needed to prepare herself. This time, there was no desperation that would boot her into power - she would have to go against real opponents, people with twenty year's worth of interspacial-relations experience.
She lived a highly competitive life now. There were many who would prefer her to leave the ring for reasons other than that her father was the politician he was, his assassination, and her general popularity - she was younger than any had been when they entered politics; she was a woman, a girl, really; she could influence the people of Earth as well the colonies, which no one else could and which kept her, if nothing else did, firmly rooted in her position. She was a league unto herself. Her youth simply mirrored her vitality; the idealism and self-righteousness that lent a crisp edge to her character impressed on others a vision of seriousness, maturity and foresight.
After the intense confusion the war had caused - soldiers dying, citizens dying, life in space nearly caving in, economical ruin, and political chaos starting and ending with Treize Kushrenada, and initially, the first Heero Yuy - Relena Darlian was a needed breath of fresh air. But where was her place in all this? Was a seventeen-year-old girl to lead civilization to peace on her own? Who did she have with her to act as the backbone of a body to which she was the heart? When would the fresh-faced politician wilt, as all politicians did, earlier than most. Would the opposition she faced be too great a climb? Would her apparent determination and obstinate nature overtake her? (That question, not her own, was a stanger bumping shoulders with the familiar thoughts in her head. It was a curiosity). After all, with youth came naivete - that idealist nature of her's acted as sure prove of that, right? (The stranger brought a friend to rub shoulders with, then). Were people even ready? God knew everyone felt they were, but a knowing mind is always squinting to see better.
Then there was the age factor. In many ways, she was too young to be nominated for her party. Legal restrictions demanded a person be twenty-three to run for positions in government, and she was not even seventeen yet. Unofficially, a full college education was expected from nominees (and, really, almost everyone involved in campaigning). She was already reporting to other diplomats as a way for others to keep tabs on her - she would meet with them monthly to discuss her aims, intentions, even her speeches, etc. Some of these people held a lesser rank than her, which obsured their motives in dealing with the Representative of Earth, Relena Darlian. She sometimes had the impression they reacted jealously to her work,which she found very unfortunate. Her objectives were constantly misconstrued, a result of her catapaulting journey to fame. Though only a true politician in the last few months, Relena had gained greatly experience. She understood that, no matter the state of Cinq's economy, over which she exercised the control a nation's figurehead may hold, and no matter the conditions between the colonies and Earth, the source of the greastest of her worries, she needed to complete her education. to work in the full sphere her position demanded of her. To grow into the changing politics of her day Relena found it an unsaid requirement that she finish her education.
But the time that required...Relena sank her chin into the dip of her curved hand. She would graduate from undergraduate school in AC 200, and if she decided to go for a master's degree, she wouldn't see the end of school until AC 204. If she started now - as she knew she could - she would be twenty-five when she finally graduated. She was not sure she could stay out that long - the reams of some obligation only partly known to her now filled her gut. She could not just drop everything for something as comparatively petty as that (perhaps an exaggeration on her part). This was rather self-righteous to think, but people needed her, she had her father's shoes to fill, a gap in history was her's to complete. The idealist in her ran screaming through her head at the thought of quitting politics, even if it were only a temporary lapse in the politics Relena gave so much to, expected so much of!
Her head had begun to hurt, a dull, slow ache lurking in the eyesockets. The garden's heady smell came close to being nauseating but Relena forced the feeling out of her system. She wanted to stay, it was so pretty. Besides, she had not really eaten anything in the past four hours, there was nothing retching would help.
The continuous unraveling of her thoughts continued.
That she was a woman in a game still dominated by men played against her as well. As much as she disliked it, the truth was that most men on her playing field saw her as more of a threat than she really was (or, perhaps not - perhaps they're evaluation of her as an immediate threat was accurate. Only time would tell). As the figurehead of Romaefeller earlier, she had taken on more than the other heads of Romaefeller had wanted her to. She became what she represented, which no one had planned, least of all expected. It irritated them - at first, they reacted treating her as one would a rash would, then as a deteriorating disease. That she had kept at it this long and this successfully irked a great many that said little to that effect - always, always she had to keep an eye out for one of those. Looking over her shoulder was beginning to become a reflex.
Another idea pushed into the crowded party pulsing in Relena's brain. It brought her to the subject of everyone only indirectly involved with the war - the primary victims, the people outside of the army and the government, the middle and lower classes, blue collar workers. She was something unique to them for other reasons than she was useful to the ESUN, or her own team. The people she worked with had been eye-witnesses to some part of the war - it had been rather hard to escape, as she found out herself - and therefore she held a special connection with them.
The people to whom she was appealing to saw her in a different light - the reason she felt she sometimes played a role rather than be herself in front of an audience was that they saw a different person there. In their eyes, she was the martyr that hadn't died, the prophet that spoke ahead of schedule. Her age made a winsome impression on those crowds who considered her youth both unusual and adorable. They could take her seriously without being reminded of rank blood, that uncle missing in action, the after-effects of government rationing. That she had to work under so many restrictions - not half of them officially known, but it was accurately guessed that she worked under special conditions - somehow charmed the masses, ensured them of her mortality. They even saw the act of her immediate education put on hold as a direct sacrifice and this boosted morale!
It was weird that everything that could hold her back in the future now counted for her. What was personally not so good for her appealed to a crowd - appealed to the self-absorbed, selfish, grubbing parts of people that could sometimes put a person out of politics forever under the influence of circumstantial evidence alone!
She was getting ahead of herself and her head was near bursting. This thought turned out a little louder than the rest and reigned over the hum in her skull.
The war that these people had seen, the people that voted for her!, was a different one from the one Relena had been involved in. Granted, she had seen an unsual, downright eccentric side of war - an estranged brother, Gundam pilots that some people now said had not even existed but were pure gossip created by the gaps in records detailing the past year - she had argued with Treize Kushrenada on multiple occations, survived an encounter with Heero's former trainer - a man who, even then, barely after turning fifteen, Relena felt she'd rather not be alone with.....all this, this huge mountain of unsorted data, made her wonder at people's sincerity and eagerness when they declared themselves for her cause. How could they know? They hadn't been through what she had. That war had created a moat around her, disconnecting her from what was popular thought. An island in the middle of hilly land. Of course, she would not wish her experiences on them, just as she'd rather not know the specifics of their past experiences either. But she worried that someday, someone would ask her, and at her response wonder from what angle she came from as this certainly was not what they were expecting. Oh, expectations - would she ever live up to the half of them that were important enough? There were so many things she could worry about without reusing the worry from the day before - new day, new worry. (She didn't really like this idea, though, and it disappeared as quickly as it had come about).
All the same, this must have been something like what her father experienced. Relena cocked her head to the side, completely unaware of her surroundings now, the image of her father fresh in her mind. He had been relatively young when he started his political career at twenty-two, first as part of a major campaign - he helped write the speeches. To hear her father speak the result of writing speeches was quite different than from what he had imagined for himself. By then, he had parted from the background machinery making up a campaign and joined the front ranks, beside the man he used to write one-third of his words for - Heero Yuy. Heero Yuy introduced him to the heavy work that became her father's life, shuttling across space everywhere, gaining all kinds of connections. Relena's father, by then, realized he had picked the path he would take for the rest of his life. It was a sobering notion.
At Heero Yuy's assassination in AC 180 her father held his own career and had formed an alliance with important business men, as a politician's biggest adversary remained the merchant. One of these was Mr. Winner, head of the Winner family. On a side note, he was one of the first people to become introduced to the youngest of Mr. Winner's children, and the only child not born of a test-tube - Quatre Raberba Winner.
He met Relena's mother not two years later - in AC 184 they were married. And according to the timeline forming her past, Cinq fell in AC 185, bringing her to stay permanently with the newly-weds as their five-year-old child. A coppery taste bloomed in her mouth as Relena chewed on the inside of her bottom lip, this summary of her life particularly fascinating to her because it seemed so very planned-out, as though someone had traced her life's general path through all the occurences of her late father's.
It certainly didn't feel like this path was marked all that much by her true bloodline, the Peacecraft family. She possessed that name like one who hoards their jewels in a safe - by keeping it out of sight it was still her's to contemplate, if not to mimick. She was a Peacecraft but also a second-generation politician of the Darlian line. It was really what she wanted.
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Heero stomped up the last of the steps, turning sharply into an empty, gray corridor with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. An empty canvas bag hung over one wrist poking out of his pant pocket; each step echoed in the cement corridor. He advanced to the next set of staircases at the end of the hall - halfway up those he would be at his door. The one-bedroom flat he now rented by the week sat at the top of an apartment complex, the small bathroom missing some tiling and the kitchen microwave with its own quirky personality; a large window opened his bedroom up to the neighborhod he had washed up in, its dingy, unloving atmosphere.
A staggering sound came from behind; he turned, frozen in midstride. An old man pushed his way past the door Heero had just come from, one hand on the doorframe to steady the sway in his step. When he looked up Heero found himself locking gazes with the cloudy-green eyes of a papery-skinned retiree, the bagginess of his shirt emphasizing his thin-shouldered frame and the prominence of his adam's apple, his thick-soled sandals displaying knobby feet and yellowing, tiny toe nails. The old man cocked his head at Heero, a distrustful expression thickening the pea-soup green of his eyes.
"Who the hell are you?" He blustered. He had a scratchy, goat-like quality to his voice, as though he yodeled under his breath while he spoke. Apparently, he expected an answer to his query, his eyes flitting over Heero throughout.
"I'm a new renter." Heero motioned with his head to the door halfway up the next staircase. "Over there."
"Alright." The old man chewed the inside of his cheek, pushing his bottom lip forward. "In that case, help me with this crap here." Heero's eyes focused on a few lumpy shapes in the doorway behind the old man. The old man seemed maddened by his lack of movement. "Either say you've got a lay coming on or get moving! Hell, don't be troublesome." Heero turned around and they eyed each other, each weighing their growing dislike and indifference toward the other, asking whether the feeling was really worth the effort.
"Alright, you demanding old bag." Heero reiterated. "I'll help you. What do you have over there?"
"None of your fucking business - just some things I need to get to the roof." The old man turned back and grabbed one of the lumps - he pulled it along the ground, a coarse, lumpy sack smelling of rotting potatos. Heero went back and grabbed the remaining two, each reaching from his hip to the ground and very compact. With the old man leading the way they passed Heero's door; at the top of the staircase the old man took out some keys and undid the locks holding together some chains barring the door. With a sniff in Heero's direction the old man quickly pocketed the keys in the depths of his vest. Heero could feel his eyes glaring at him indifferently out the back of his head.
Air rushed through Heero's hair and the smell of the sacks in his hands left him, blowing behind him down the hall. The old man pushed forward again, heading for a small makeshift shack to the right. The roof had a view little different from the one he got in the morning; a spread of buildings in earthy tones, all sizes, and a ring of green at the far outer edge that joined with the sky in a haze of aqua at the horizon. The old man forced the door of the shack open and deposited his booty inside - he gestured for Heero to do the same.
"Good. That's all." The old man dismissed him with the wave of a hand.
But Heero had spied something interesting just behind the door leading back into the building. The door rose up from the otherwise flat surface of the roof near the end of it; the shack was squeezed into one corner, leaving all the rest behind the door an empty lot. In this the old man had erected a solid-looking greenhouse. The various shades of green were startling against the brown-gray backgrop provided by the city and Heero was forced to stare outright. The old man stared at him with eyebrows that had sunk over his eyes, meeting in the middle to form a gray, bristling line of long hairs.
Heero brought his stare back and down at the old man, who he towered over by a head in height.
"How'd you get galvanized metal piping for the joints?" The old man seemed quite taken aback by the brusque manner of the question. He considered Heero with a wrinkle of his chin as he folded his bottom lip over the upper.
"Friends of friends." He claimed, thrusting his chest out. Heero jeered at him, his lips forming an unkind grin.
Heero approached the greenhouse until he was close enough to inspect the plants. This made the old man nervous as he kept to Heero's side, continuously chewing on the inside of his cheek.
"Man, watch what you're - "
"Did you get this out of a shipment of nails from Earth?"
The old man sputtered.
"I'd rather not say." He murmured, bristling.
"Don't worry, I won't say anything."
"Really." The old man resumed biting the lining of his cheek. "I don't see how you'd understand, man. You look fresh."
"I'm not."
"You look it, all quiet and young." The old man paused, nodding softly as though agreeing with himself on something. "Yeah, like a student, or something." He knocked his fingertips against the glass of the greenhouse reassuringly. "This, though - 'been my only reason to stay on this fucking trash heap." He kept his eyes level, staring at the greenhouse. "But I couldn't expect you to understand."
They began a halting conversation, not quite focusing on anything, in the perimeters which the old man set for Heero - Heero, the young, unknowing busybody, and the old man, a seasoned, crabby personage used to inconsistent human contact. The greenhouse was what kept Heero's attention but the old man never cared to explain it - a greenhouse in the middle of a city where all the things needed to keep it up were short at hand. Heero could see his reflection in the glass walls if he tried to and he could not see what the old man did, the untried, expectant scholar. Worse - he could see all that was wrong with him this way, with the old man talking on and on about things that had nothing to do with what he said, as though what the old man needed most was an impersonal connection. Well, he had it, this was just about as impersonal as it could get.
What did the old man see? What of Heero expressed scholarliness, newness? There was nothing of the sort present in Heero, not even to the onlooker - he felt more like a piece of fruit bruised and only telling of its bruises by the overripe smell it gives off.
"You're a bad judge of character, ojji." The old man looked startle - he had been talking about a newspaper line he was particularly disgusted with when Heero interrupted him. Then he nodded.
"Generally." Crossing his arms, he continued, "I've always seen what I first see. And now I'm past seventy, people let me do that." Pause. "I'm Cloke - this is Grenja." He patted the glass wall of the greenhouse. Heero felt his eyebrows rise.
"Grenja?"
"Yeah." The old man - Cloke - sounded gruff. "Grenja."
Heero stared Grenja up and down before introducing himself to this new neighbor, Cloke, and Grenja, the greenhouse.
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First of all, that I gave Relena such a detailed past - though it corresponds (I'm pretty sure) with the dates given in the series, everything is up to personal interpretation. I never liked it when the author included some hard to believe or make-believe account of a character's life or history, it made the story harder to believe. This was necessary, though, as Relena's entire past will have something to do with the outcome of this fic and I needed to include it to make everything consistent. In other words, you are welcome to refuse every detail or not - I'm not here to force my version of events on anyone. My main hope is that I remain consistent with the character's personality as seen in the series.
Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm, it's really appreciated. I hope you continue to enjoy this fic. ^ ^
(PS: Keep your eyes open for a new story of mine, 'Clay Antlers' - it's a surprise).