Disclaimer: Usual applies.
Here we go. ^ ^ Enjoy!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Heero often cooked his own food; simple things, like pasta or french toast, recipes requiring few ingredients and a casual approach to preparing it. The small fridge he kept in the corner of the main room held all of maybe four things at a time: a bottle of milk, enough for two days, some margarine, eggs and bread. As he was a chronic label-reader, haunting a set of shelves in a grocery store for as long as a quarter of an hour searching for what was right, he knew the difference between calorie intake and low-carb, low-sugar foods - the difference between margarine and butter - the advantages to bread with fewer additives, preservatives. He considered making bread sometime as it was said to be difficult, mainly involving good timing and a knack for knowing how much, but as yet he just bought a loaf of whatever every few days when he saw he was running out.
It was a solitary, busying activity, very unlike what he knew. He could involve himself in the food; as he was the only taste-tester to please, he could focus on preparing the food just as he would like it. And it was quiet and open up where he was: he cooked, ate, dressed and slept in front of the same, large window occupying most of the wall facing out onto the city.
His apartment consisted of two rooms, actually a very disproportional description: the one room he really lived in contained a mattress on the floor, a small table that he could fold together, two chairs that didn't match, and a small stove-and-sink combination with a single cupboard. As the floor, walls and ceilings were the uniform gray of untouched concrete he laid out rugs to at least differentiate between where the walls and floor began. Off to the side stood a cramped bathroom with a small glassed-in stall for a shower and a sink he had been scrubbing at diligently for the past few days, relieving it of layers of grime.
Up above (he was on the twentieth floor: this apartment building had a total of thirty floors) he heard the consistent murmur of loud orchestral or opera music: the occupant, whom he passed on the stairwell every blue moon or so, was an old bitty of a woman with a hearing disability: she had been a concert leader in years earlier and loved music, but she had to turn it up to the highest volume to enjoy it. Heero didn't mind: it meant he heard very good music whenever he was at home, floating down from Mrs. Chavelier's snug-a-bug hole in the wall.
Heero glanced out the window and over the city as he spooned scrambled eggs onto a plate: carrying these to the little table he sat, still entranced by the view. Apart from the startling height at which he viewed it there was nothing special about it: lots of little gray roofs varying in tone, some factories farther out, patches of green that indicated parks. But it was an all-absorbing view, one in which he could sink himself in. And there was no one to interrupt him: he could sit like this for a long time without moving, seemingly without having thought or heard or really seen anything until he moved, breaking the trance he kept himself in.
Heero's intial anxieties after seeing the doctor in so crowded a place as the airport had unsettled him deeply: the timing, he felt acutely, was very, very wrong. There was supposed to be some sort of climax, a milestone to pass, before he could relinquish the Zero to its true owner, its bioligical parent, or whatever else might happen then. It was so far in the future - yet another thing his instincts told him - the exact results or circumstances were hard to foretell. He preferred his bleak surroundings and solitary life, right now, the act of living in a moment so stretched out he could see no end to it, though it would feel like only a second passed when it was finally over. This felt like a selfmade purgatory: he was here before he would meet the Judge of his life, the person who had set him up from the beginning.
Did this make him an atheist? No, no, this had nothing to do with religion. Heero thought along that vein for a while, pondering on what kind of a person he would be where he to become an atheist. A non-believer. Would anyone blame him? Dr. J would find it hilarious. Dr. J was an atheist, to be sure. No one could freely give so much hell without being one unless they were looking for some sort of redemption in the form of horrible misdeeds...yet another thought Dr. J would find humourous, in his own dry, scornful way.
He chewed slowly, making the small meal last. He knew, in a disjointed, felt-out way come of groping in the dark of a mind unlit, a conscious purposely ignoring the switch to the bulb overhead, that his somewhat haggard appearance had given him this apartment, this clean, threadbare freedom. He impressed upon people the appearance of someone aged beyond recognition - it baffled a person. No one would have given a minor an apartment but no one knew he was underaged. He lied to their faces and they took the lies, almost afraid of what would happen were they to stretch a hand out for the truth.
The truth? Heero thought a moment. I am alone, utterly alone, more alone than most people are willing to be. I experience spiritual drought and mental wear. People have worn my thoughts and ideas until they ripped the seams and I had to get new ones.
I have felt poetry where you only read it.
I have laughed with Insanity and played tricks with it on innocents. I felt its arm around my neck in the threatening, brotherly manner of a one-armed hug. I once was made aware that there was no difference between Insanity and Sanity; they are as identical twins.
I've seen my future in the fall of my teacher: I didn't like it and now seek a future torn from the old, so I'm not sure if this blindness will end when I finally reach my new, alternate ending.
I am too young for a lot of things, too young to settle down, too young to lease an apartment, too young for real sex, though I wouldn't mind - I think - experiencing the mind-blowing kind. I am too young to shave.
I feel dangerous in the constraints of my own mind as I am still getting used to the law that people need rules to live. I hadn't ever thought I'd live before. Life always seemed a rug about to be pulled from under my feet.
I have found eyes that match mine and an expression of feeling that echo my own. I have found one of the Ultimate Answers in this universe: people never quite see what they really have in common, have 'in identical', with others because they just don't, won't see it - others do, others always find that grain of a person's character in another because they're neither person, and as being neither person puts them on higher ground, they can say - You are the same!
Are these truths that anyone wants to here? Of course not. It would frighten the daylights out of the poor lady who leased him this apartment, worried he was a runaway from a rehab center, or the man on the curb who sold dark bread and homemade jam, the glazed look of his eyes telling the customer he only saw other people as ghosts with purses.
In this, Heero was very gentle: doling out lies where truths would sear and burn.
Heero turned the faucet on and began scrubbing at his plate. He used to do the dishes when he still trained with Dr. J: the practice made this quick chore last less than a minute. He put the dish, fork and knife in their customary place in the cupboard. Then he pulled down a mug and started coffee brewing. He almost never went to bed at a normal hour, usually working at his laptop until he felt sleepy or his eyes became grainy. They did nowadays, since he only had one, rather dim light to use when the colony darkened for its pretend night. The music upstairs turned off at around ten in the evening: traffic quieted below: roof-parties gave bright bursts of color to what would otherwise be a boring part of colony life. He would arrange his mattress a few feet from the window, to cushion his body when he sat unmoving but for wandering eyes and moving fingers, so as to get off as much as possible on this life he now led, this life apart from - everything. Separate and mostly severed but for a small string that yet attached to him the conveniences and speed of the modern world.
Where he was as a monk in a one-man monastery his laptop connected him to everything. He didn't receive orders or business through it anymore as he had found ways of being completely self-sufficient. The internet could tell him everything - if not directly it suggested or affirmed what he already guessed. Heero was adept at internet usage, most especially methods of tracking down and exhuming files of things he wanted to know. Given time he found Howard's new post - Howard subscribed to a magazine sold only in the region of the country he lived in, under a different name: the "Metal Clinic Gazette". Heero thought he spotted a place Dr. J had been in, but it was always hard to tell as Dr. J excelled at not being seen. Heero also read up on Relena's doings and going-ons, examining recent photos showing her with her mother, Mrs. Darlian, and various team members, studying articles on her objectively.
For the weeks to come he kept to his apartment, walked about the city only at daytime, and talked with few people - he knew very few people, to begin with, and he had no interest or investment in knowing more than the number he did. He was an established recluse, for the time being. One of the few he saw regularly was Cloke Ikjen, the Icelander.
Cloke spoke softly but he was, by nature, a gruff character, both physically and spiritually old. Little but his memories remained or felt young to him. He spoke with a bluntness that Heero didn't question and that he relished: it was unlike the sarcastic, cutting remarks Dr. J served up like acid in wineglasses. Often, though, they disagreed with each other: when they did, they kept to the 'agree to disagree' rule.
Heero helped drag up bags of things for Cloke Ikjen several more times before the old man softened to his presence. From then on, Heero went to the roof almost daily, where Cloke could be found in or around the greenhouse. All it took was knocking at the door.
Best of all: they could say nothing to each other all afternoon and neither would feel slighted.
"I wish it would rain here, once in a while." Heero glanced at Cloke, the sweat gleaming on the wrinkled forehead. "It would make my part a mite easier. I've seen greenhouses - bigger than this! - with these - hinges - and stuff on the roof that would open it up whenever rain came. Then drains in the ground would carry the runoff excess to be stored underneath until needed. Neat, yeah?"
Cloke looked up at the sky as though to check that no rain would fall to render his statement pointless. He tightened his grip on his small hoeing instrument and began working the soil in a long, trench-like bed again. Heero sat outside on an old sack to help ward off the hardness of the concrete. He watched.
He usually just watched.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
They were often there, on the street corner, singing. French songs, if his ear was right. Three lightly browned girls, as though they had been shoved into a toaster oven for a bit. Around them, it felt like early summer, warm, lightly fragnant, fresh and drowsy. Along those streets he came up against a lot of things - the voices of so many, mingling; the burnt sweat smell of noxious body odor; a sense, not quite a smell, of the industry that ran this city, underscoring the purpose of everyone's life there; the abrupt aplomb of a flower shop, bravely surviving in a place without any natural gardens (at least, not natural by his standards, though in a few generations, it would seem natural enough).
Those girls. They sang quickly, fluently, unintentionally charming but with all intent of being coy. They had high voices.
Heero's attention would never have been brought to them had one of them not - purposely, he knew - bumped into him, upsetting a bag of groceries. She made him spill a bottle of milk! What had started as a girlish try at playing tricks became a blushing affair of murmured apologies and then her running off to get him another bottle of milk. So he stayed, watching her leave, watching her return, his face a set expression of stony, unwavering indifference - it just made her stammer, when she had never stammered before! And he hadn't meant to be so mean-looking, so grim, so - turned-off by her very presence! (What, did she have 'cooties' written across her chest or something?!).
Other than that, he hadn't any contact with the strangers on the street, and that had been one time. (The girl steadfastly refused to meet his eye after that, even though she followed him with her quizzical gaze whenever his back was turned).
Heero kept track of the colony's orbit around earth, and the orbit of some other colonies that held interest to him. He even signed up for both the competing newspapers there, and often bought one from Earth that he got at a small corner shop selling various stuff - the shop was called Tabac. It made his hands look less empty, walking about with a newspaper, settling on a bench half in the shade with it and reading. He could catch up much quicker, and cheaper, using his laptop but he desired something material, tangible.
Slowly but surely, he developed a routine. He saw Cloke often, solving the unconscious need for both human contact and interaction (though Cloke was a very poor substitute for the rest of humanity, being very cross, sometimes whiny, and not the best of conversationalists - he enjoyed trying to get a rise out of Heero whenever the younger somehow 'won' in their verbal competitions, though each attempt failed quickly under Heero's quiet refusal to react). Heero walked the length and width of the colony, exploring its workings, even going under the city to where he saw the bowels of what kept it afloat; he stayed up late and woke at almost the same time every day, and ate much the same things his entire stay.
In the neighborhood he stayed at - after just two weeks of living there Heero began to recognize slight differences in his surroundings and those of other, farther-off places that finally put the city into squares of territory - he went to a certain washer's for his clothes and certain grocery stores. He walked on much the same streets, even though he had gone along and knew every other ally and passageway in the area. As there were no 'sights' to be seen he was spared the tourism that was gradually growing in Space as Earth citizens became more interested in their far-off brethren, the other part of their race.
He felt he was still searching for more Universal Answers. Those, though, are hard to come by in general and that he had was only through the extensive knowledge of an enemy. Had it not been for Treize, he would never have touched on that Universal Answer. Perhaps he was better off not knowing more.
Curiosity killed the cat.
Treize winked from the dark depths of death, mouthing this.
- but...Heero had time to live now.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
I know, this is very short (in comparison to what I usually write) - regardless, I feel this is one of my more poetic efforts. There's writing from a person's POV and then writing from inside a person's head: this was the latter. It was a little scary. Heero is becoming less 2-D and more 3-D in my mind all the time - and since he's changing into something more solid now I am only able to throw the right things in his way to make him go along the story line I picked out. It's kind of exciting. And I finally feel like time is really passing now! - before I was almost writing these guys' DIARIES, it was so day to day to day to day.....
Constructive criticism would be welcome here, I feel I took a lot of, erm, creative license in this chapter with Heero's character - I want to keep him as much IN character as is possible, and your opinion would help greatly. I appreciate your (reader's) support and enthusiasm - I hope you like this chapter. (Please review. ^ ^).
Here we go. ^ ^ Enjoy!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Heero often cooked his own food; simple things, like pasta or french toast, recipes requiring few ingredients and a casual approach to preparing it. The small fridge he kept in the corner of the main room held all of maybe four things at a time: a bottle of milk, enough for two days, some margarine, eggs and bread. As he was a chronic label-reader, haunting a set of shelves in a grocery store for as long as a quarter of an hour searching for what was right, he knew the difference between calorie intake and low-carb, low-sugar foods - the difference between margarine and butter - the advantages to bread with fewer additives, preservatives. He considered making bread sometime as it was said to be difficult, mainly involving good timing and a knack for knowing how much, but as yet he just bought a loaf of whatever every few days when he saw he was running out.
It was a solitary, busying activity, very unlike what he knew. He could involve himself in the food; as he was the only taste-tester to please, he could focus on preparing the food just as he would like it. And it was quiet and open up where he was: he cooked, ate, dressed and slept in front of the same, large window occupying most of the wall facing out onto the city.
His apartment consisted of two rooms, actually a very disproportional description: the one room he really lived in contained a mattress on the floor, a small table that he could fold together, two chairs that didn't match, and a small stove-and-sink combination with a single cupboard. As the floor, walls and ceilings were the uniform gray of untouched concrete he laid out rugs to at least differentiate between where the walls and floor began. Off to the side stood a cramped bathroom with a small glassed-in stall for a shower and a sink he had been scrubbing at diligently for the past few days, relieving it of layers of grime.
Up above (he was on the twentieth floor: this apartment building had a total of thirty floors) he heard the consistent murmur of loud orchestral or opera music: the occupant, whom he passed on the stairwell every blue moon or so, was an old bitty of a woman with a hearing disability: she had been a concert leader in years earlier and loved music, but she had to turn it up to the highest volume to enjoy it. Heero didn't mind: it meant he heard very good music whenever he was at home, floating down from Mrs. Chavelier's snug-a-bug hole in the wall.
Heero glanced out the window and over the city as he spooned scrambled eggs onto a plate: carrying these to the little table he sat, still entranced by the view. Apart from the startling height at which he viewed it there was nothing special about it: lots of little gray roofs varying in tone, some factories farther out, patches of green that indicated parks. But it was an all-absorbing view, one in which he could sink himself in. And there was no one to interrupt him: he could sit like this for a long time without moving, seemingly without having thought or heard or really seen anything until he moved, breaking the trance he kept himself in.
Heero's intial anxieties after seeing the doctor in so crowded a place as the airport had unsettled him deeply: the timing, he felt acutely, was very, very wrong. There was supposed to be some sort of climax, a milestone to pass, before he could relinquish the Zero to its true owner, its bioligical parent, or whatever else might happen then. It was so far in the future - yet another thing his instincts told him - the exact results or circumstances were hard to foretell. He preferred his bleak surroundings and solitary life, right now, the act of living in a moment so stretched out he could see no end to it, though it would feel like only a second passed when it was finally over. This felt like a selfmade purgatory: he was here before he would meet the Judge of his life, the person who had set him up from the beginning.
Did this make him an atheist? No, no, this had nothing to do with religion. Heero thought along that vein for a while, pondering on what kind of a person he would be where he to become an atheist. A non-believer. Would anyone blame him? Dr. J would find it hilarious. Dr. J was an atheist, to be sure. No one could freely give so much hell without being one unless they were looking for some sort of redemption in the form of horrible misdeeds...yet another thought Dr. J would find humourous, in his own dry, scornful way.
He chewed slowly, making the small meal last. He knew, in a disjointed, felt-out way come of groping in the dark of a mind unlit, a conscious purposely ignoring the switch to the bulb overhead, that his somewhat haggard appearance had given him this apartment, this clean, threadbare freedom. He impressed upon people the appearance of someone aged beyond recognition - it baffled a person. No one would have given a minor an apartment but no one knew he was underaged. He lied to their faces and they took the lies, almost afraid of what would happen were they to stretch a hand out for the truth.
The truth? Heero thought a moment. I am alone, utterly alone, more alone than most people are willing to be. I experience spiritual drought and mental wear. People have worn my thoughts and ideas until they ripped the seams and I had to get new ones.
I have felt poetry where you only read it.
I have laughed with Insanity and played tricks with it on innocents. I felt its arm around my neck in the threatening, brotherly manner of a one-armed hug. I once was made aware that there was no difference between Insanity and Sanity; they are as identical twins.
I've seen my future in the fall of my teacher: I didn't like it and now seek a future torn from the old, so I'm not sure if this blindness will end when I finally reach my new, alternate ending.
I am too young for a lot of things, too young to settle down, too young to lease an apartment, too young for real sex, though I wouldn't mind - I think - experiencing the mind-blowing kind. I am too young to shave.
I feel dangerous in the constraints of my own mind as I am still getting used to the law that people need rules to live. I hadn't ever thought I'd live before. Life always seemed a rug about to be pulled from under my feet.
I have found eyes that match mine and an expression of feeling that echo my own. I have found one of the Ultimate Answers in this universe: people never quite see what they really have in common, have 'in identical', with others because they just don't, won't see it - others do, others always find that grain of a person's character in another because they're neither person, and as being neither person puts them on higher ground, they can say - You are the same!
Are these truths that anyone wants to here? Of course not. It would frighten the daylights out of the poor lady who leased him this apartment, worried he was a runaway from a rehab center, or the man on the curb who sold dark bread and homemade jam, the glazed look of his eyes telling the customer he only saw other people as ghosts with purses.
In this, Heero was very gentle: doling out lies where truths would sear and burn.
Heero turned the faucet on and began scrubbing at his plate. He used to do the dishes when he still trained with Dr. J: the practice made this quick chore last less than a minute. He put the dish, fork and knife in their customary place in the cupboard. Then he pulled down a mug and started coffee brewing. He almost never went to bed at a normal hour, usually working at his laptop until he felt sleepy or his eyes became grainy. They did nowadays, since he only had one, rather dim light to use when the colony darkened for its pretend night. The music upstairs turned off at around ten in the evening: traffic quieted below: roof-parties gave bright bursts of color to what would otherwise be a boring part of colony life. He would arrange his mattress a few feet from the window, to cushion his body when he sat unmoving but for wandering eyes and moving fingers, so as to get off as much as possible on this life he now led, this life apart from - everything. Separate and mostly severed but for a small string that yet attached to him the conveniences and speed of the modern world.
Where he was as a monk in a one-man monastery his laptop connected him to everything. He didn't receive orders or business through it anymore as he had found ways of being completely self-sufficient. The internet could tell him everything - if not directly it suggested or affirmed what he already guessed. Heero was adept at internet usage, most especially methods of tracking down and exhuming files of things he wanted to know. Given time he found Howard's new post - Howard subscribed to a magazine sold only in the region of the country he lived in, under a different name: the "Metal Clinic Gazette". Heero thought he spotted a place Dr. J had been in, but it was always hard to tell as Dr. J excelled at not being seen. Heero also read up on Relena's doings and going-ons, examining recent photos showing her with her mother, Mrs. Darlian, and various team members, studying articles on her objectively.
For the weeks to come he kept to his apartment, walked about the city only at daytime, and talked with few people - he knew very few people, to begin with, and he had no interest or investment in knowing more than the number he did. He was an established recluse, for the time being. One of the few he saw regularly was Cloke Ikjen, the Icelander.
Cloke spoke softly but he was, by nature, a gruff character, both physically and spiritually old. Little but his memories remained or felt young to him. He spoke with a bluntness that Heero didn't question and that he relished: it was unlike the sarcastic, cutting remarks Dr. J served up like acid in wineglasses. Often, though, they disagreed with each other: when they did, they kept to the 'agree to disagree' rule.
Heero helped drag up bags of things for Cloke Ikjen several more times before the old man softened to his presence. From then on, Heero went to the roof almost daily, where Cloke could be found in or around the greenhouse. All it took was knocking at the door.
Best of all: they could say nothing to each other all afternoon and neither would feel slighted.
"I wish it would rain here, once in a while." Heero glanced at Cloke, the sweat gleaming on the wrinkled forehead. "It would make my part a mite easier. I've seen greenhouses - bigger than this! - with these - hinges - and stuff on the roof that would open it up whenever rain came. Then drains in the ground would carry the runoff excess to be stored underneath until needed. Neat, yeah?"
Cloke looked up at the sky as though to check that no rain would fall to render his statement pointless. He tightened his grip on his small hoeing instrument and began working the soil in a long, trench-like bed again. Heero sat outside on an old sack to help ward off the hardness of the concrete. He watched.
He usually just watched.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
They were often there, on the street corner, singing. French songs, if his ear was right. Three lightly browned girls, as though they had been shoved into a toaster oven for a bit. Around them, it felt like early summer, warm, lightly fragnant, fresh and drowsy. Along those streets he came up against a lot of things - the voices of so many, mingling; the burnt sweat smell of noxious body odor; a sense, not quite a smell, of the industry that ran this city, underscoring the purpose of everyone's life there; the abrupt aplomb of a flower shop, bravely surviving in a place without any natural gardens (at least, not natural by his standards, though in a few generations, it would seem natural enough).
Those girls. They sang quickly, fluently, unintentionally charming but with all intent of being coy. They had high voices.
Heero's attention would never have been brought to them had one of them not - purposely, he knew - bumped into him, upsetting a bag of groceries. She made him spill a bottle of milk! What had started as a girlish try at playing tricks became a blushing affair of murmured apologies and then her running off to get him another bottle of milk. So he stayed, watching her leave, watching her return, his face a set expression of stony, unwavering indifference - it just made her stammer, when she had never stammered before! And he hadn't meant to be so mean-looking, so grim, so - turned-off by her very presence! (What, did she have 'cooties' written across her chest or something?!).
Other than that, he hadn't any contact with the strangers on the street, and that had been one time. (The girl steadfastly refused to meet his eye after that, even though she followed him with her quizzical gaze whenever his back was turned).
Heero kept track of the colony's orbit around earth, and the orbit of some other colonies that held interest to him. He even signed up for both the competing newspapers there, and often bought one from Earth that he got at a small corner shop selling various stuff - the shop was called Tabac. It made his hands look less empty, walking about with a newspaper, settling on a bench half in the shade with it and reading. He could catch up much quicker, and cheaper, using his laptop but he desired something material, tangible.
Slowly but surely, he developed a routine. He saw Cloke often, solving the unconscious need for both human contact and interaction (though Cloke was a very poor substitute for the rest of humanity, being very cross, sometimes whiny, and not the best of conversationalists - he enjoyed trying to get a rise out of Heero whenever the younger somehow 'won' in their verbal competitions, though each attempt failed quickly under Heero's quiet refusal to react). Heero walked the length and width of the colony, exploring its workings, even going under the city to where he saw the bowels of what kept it afloat; he stayed up late and woke at almost the same time every day, and ate much the same things his entire stay.
In the neighborhood he stayed at - after just two weeks of living there Heero began to recognize slight differences in his surroundings and those of other, farther-off places that finally put the city into squares of territory - he went to a certain washer's for his clothes and certain grocery stores. He walked on much the same streets, even though he had gone along and knew every other ally and passageway in the area. As there were no 'sights' to be seen he was spared the tourism that was gradually growing in Space as Earth citizens became more interested in their far-off brethren, the other part of their race.
He felt he was still searching for more Universal Answers. Those, though, are hard to come by in general and that he had was only through the extensive knowledge of an enemy. Had it not been for Treize, he would never have touched on that Universal Answer. Perhaps he was better off not knowing more.
Curiosity killed the cat.
Treize winked from the dark depths of death, mouthing this.
- but...Heero had time to live now.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
I know, this is very short (in comparison to what I usually write) - regardless, I feel this is one of my more poetic efforts. There's writing from a person's POV and then writing from inside a person's head: this was the latter. It was a little scary. Heero is becoming less 2-D and more 3-D in my mind all the time - and since he's changing into something more solid now I am only able to throw the right things in his way to make him go along the story line I picked out. It's kind of exciting. And I finally feel like time is really passing now! - before I was almost writing these guys' DIARIES, it was so day to day to day to day.....
Constructive criticism would be welcome here, I feel I took a lot of, erm, creative license in this chapter with Heero's character - I want to keep him as much IN character as is possible, and your opinion would help greatly. I appreciate your (reader's) support and enthusiasm - I hope you like this chapter. (Please review. ^ ^).