Hereafter

Chapter 16

March Madness Prompt

Holiday

Another hour passed with no news. And then another. More bodies were found. Two survivors were pulled from the rubble and rushed to the hospital.

Trowa had decided to supervise the excavation work that was taking place where Quatre and Dorothy were buried. Heero went with him, but it turned out that there wasn't much to see and nothing he could do to help. It was apparently delicate work and Dorothy had been asked to stop communicating as her phone was nearly out of battery. The engineers working the site said that they were close, but they had to shore up a sort of tunnel to get at where the pair of them were and they had needed to wait for some equipment to arrive first.

Heero finally sat down. He found a cinder block on the edge of the excavation area, one that hadn't been totally pulverized by the blast, and just sat. When his rump landed on the block, whatever energy remained in his body drained out of him like a sieve.

Behind Trowa and the engineers, the sky was beginning to blush with the beginnings of sunset.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Lucrezia Noin, who pulled up a thick piece of piping to form her own makeshift chair and sat beside him. Together, they looked out at the ruins.

"Heero," she said. "Whatever happens today, I just want you to remember that there are still people who care about you."

Heero didn't reply for a few minutes. With darkness coming on, it was even harder to imagine that Relena would be found alive. The work crews didn't seem too confident, given all the time that had passed with still no sign of her, but Heero clung to hope. He couldn't help it.

"I love her," he told Noin. He said it quietly, but deliberately. "I love her, but I hadn't told her."

Heero didn't know when it had happened. The moment he went from thinking of Relena as an obstacle to when he started seeing her as someone worthy of admiration was one thing—he could trace that. Mostly. But he did not know when he had started to regard her as precious, where he suddenly found himself caring about every hurt, every goal, every thought she had. Prioritizing Relena came naturally to him. He did not doubt her place in his world.

Heero understood that it was common for young people in the throes of first love to over-idolize each other, to project wishes and desires onto the other that they hadn't earned. He had heard the cautionary tales. He had been warned that love was blind.

Sometimes, he found himself thinking back on those first few weeks after he had asked Relena to be his girlfriend. That day on the hill when the boy had taken their picture… That day on the street when Relena had asked him if he wanted a coffee... Those were good days. But they were also days that he had been overwhelmed by Relena's presence, where he almost couldn't see her because the strength of his feelings made her incandescent.

Even so, he felt certain his love was real.

"She knows," Noin said. "Women always know." She put on a hand on his shoulder. The pressure felt strange to Heero, but he did not shrug it off. "But as someone who has loved a Peacecraft for a long time," Noin continued. "Trust me when I say I understand."

She was talking about Relena's brother, of course, who no longer used the name Milliardo Peacecraft, nor the name Zechs, and now went by Wind—and who had disappeared for almost a year following the end of the war.

"What do I do?" Heero asked. "What do I do if she's gone?"

"You tell the air," Noin said. "Like I used to do."

"Zechs never really died, though."

"I know," Noin said. "But everyone kept telling me he was dead, and I didn't know if he was ever going to come back." She looked up to the sky, where the sun was sitting heavy in the west. There were no stars visible yet but Heero knew she was looking out into Space—where Zechs had gone after the Mariemaia uprising.

"Does he know?" Heero asked. "About today?"

"No," Noin said. "I'm sure he'd be racing here if he knew what happened—and I'd be the first one he'd contact. That he hasn't means he doesn't know. He told me he was going to take a holiday." She smirked. "But he really just hates company right now. He still loathes himself for what he did during the war."

Heero grunted.

"I expect to hear from him soon, though."

"How do you know?"

Noin drew up a chain that had been hanging around her neck. A pendant popped out from the neckline of her shirt. No, not a pendant—a ring with a white diamond that gleamed in the fading light.

"Zechs asked you to marry him?"

"I told him he'd better," Noin said. "I made him set a date too. June. He'll be back."

That was less than six weeks away.

"Aren't you annoyed?" Heero asked her.

"Yeah, but I understand too," Noin said. "Zechs loves me. He just needs some time to himself. When he comes back around this time, it will be for good. I worry about him, but I don't worry about us."

It had never crossed Heero's mind to wonder how Lucrezia Noin had been coping all this time that Zechs had been absent. Noin seemed to enjoy her job and he had heard that she was close with Lady Une and Sally Po now. But if Zechs married Lucrezia, and if Heero and Relena ever…

He looked away, suddenly overwhelmed.

He was saved from embarrassment when Trowa and the work crews broke out into cheers.