2: All I Need
By: Princess Sassafras
Notes: Quatre's POV.
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I wish I could remember how it began. So long ago, it seems like twenty years. But we aren't much older than twenty, are we? So it can't really have been that long ago. One day, I heard him speak and his words became ingrained in my skin. Much like tattooing. When the war began, knowing what I was to become, I went alone and unaccompanied to a place where no one of my House's station would go. The Underground Market. The man I found there was skilled and poor, and I let him drag the inked needles across my hipbone in the shape of arched wings. And I swore that no matter how many times I was struck down, I would rise up for someone or something I believe in. My spirit will never die.
So long ago, it seems like forever. Especially since so much has been left unsaid and undone. He left so many times, ran away to be the one opposite the four. He ran off more than Heero ever did. That is saying a lot.
Somehow each time he would reappear, his face a little older and his stance a little stiffer, my heart would beat a little quicker. Now I cannot even breathe when he's near. His words burn me, cut me, or stroke me with a force I have never known. He cannot know. If he does, he continues regardless, relentlessly. Speaking with that brutal passion.
I have cried, and I am not ashamed exactly, only cautious. Tears alone are much easier to undo than tears in the face of the one…crying in front of him could be a mistake.
I have imagined his bronze arms surrounding me, his sharp lips kissing me. His eyes softening for me. Sometimes I imagine that they do, but I brush the thought away. He looks at me as he always has, or with only a little more camaraderie perhaps than he used to.
I have never seen his black eyes so tender as the day he passed a small girl in the street looking for her mother. The girl was Caucasian, but with stunning dark hair and eyes. And she was so stricken with grief, that Wufei stopped and kneeled before her. It looked to me like a wolf lowering itself before a kitten.
"Where is your mother?" So stern, but so sincere was his tone that the little girl stopped crying and looked up into his angled face.
"She-she w-went to gh-get ma-my brother's shoe…" Wufei continued to stare earnestly, as if he were really listening. The child finally calmed enough to speak coherently. "He threw it in the bushes in the park and ran away, and she went to find him and told me to stay put, but then a man with a cart came by and he was scary, so I ran! And now I can't find her!" Her eyes brimmed with fresh tears. "I want ma-my m-mother!"
And Wufei reached down slowly and picked her up, and walked with her into the park. And she let him. Not knowing who he was and not caring. Just as an animal can sense a person's nature, children have that untainted sense of who is there to help and to harm. She sobbed on his shoulder all the way back to where she had been. And Wufei put her down before her hysterical mother, bowed, and walked away.
There have been times when I needed that: to be carried back to the place where I was safest. I can't find my way back myself. Or maybe I just need to be held against someone…against his chest. It is hard to need something you can't have. Wanting is so much easier, and can be filled by something substitute. But needing, needing is too great a thing.
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Ain't it the truth?
Princess S.