A.C. 199

Heero did not like the lectures given at the university on L1, if the professor was just going to read her own textbook to the class, he'd much rather study alone.

On the other hand, he found the extensive library on campus to be of more interest. For most of his life, he only gleaned information from screens and monitors. Reading was a purely utilitarian task, never done for pleasure. The university library possessed what to him seemed like an excessively vast collection of physical books. There were entire floors dedicated to history, philosophy, classic literature, closed-systems ecology, and mythology, just to name a few that piqued his interest. There were even replicas of technical manuals dating back to the 1800s A.D., complete with patent information. These were for reference use only and never to be borrowed out of the library, but they were available inside the facility to all post-graduate students.

At first, Heero only browsed the shelves out of curiosity. Though he never spent any extensive lengths of downtime with Relena, she had perceived that he was an inherently curious man, and encouraged him to explore that side of him.

Flipping through a physical book, he found, was a tactile treat. Initially, he often swiped his finger across the page, mistaking it for a digital tablet, these were embarrassing moments he kept to himself. Soon he was savoring the smooth glide of paper against paper as he turned each leaf. What he enjoyed most was the waft of ink with a hint of vanilla that filled his senses as he devoured the contents of the page. It reminded him of her. She once offered him a bite of her midnight snack, an unhealthy mixture of sugar, eggs, flour, and vanilla. It was a rare indulgence, but she really needed the boost of energy that night.

"Don't make me bear the burden of this guilty pleasure all by myself Heero," she pleaded with him wearing a tired smile, documents arranged in radiating patterns around her on the bed.

He missed her. Between the yellowing pages and dusty book shelves, he missed her terribly. It was a sour feeling in his belly, a shortness of breath, a phantom pain in his chest. Had he ever missed her before? Heero couldn't say for sure. He had gone to her in the past, driven by the necessity to kill her, and then the need to protect her. But she was in no danger now, she kept a low profile as the princess of a tiny country, and his longing was naked and without excuse.

Sometimes he thought it just, to punish himself by denying his innermost desires.

In his darkest moments, he remembered the things done to him as a boy, and the things he did during his career as a soldier. He had once hoped that all the blame for the miseries of war could be laid upon the instigators and profiteers. It's a fact that the ones actually fighting, are never perceived as being tainted, he wrote at one point with conviction. But he did feel tainted. He could recall each of his decisions to kill, to terminate a life. He was a willing participant, and sometimes even enjoyed it.

Heero was not trained as conventional soldiers were, who blindly followed orders without question; rather he was programmed with a set of ethics, which guided his actions regardless of mission parameters. Dekim Barton may have ordered for his emotions to be purged, but the sneaky doctor had instead taught him to internalize his feelings and use them as another set of data.

To blame someone else for his own actions was to strip himself of all agency, and he wasn't naive enough to make that mistake. Even the trick played on him by OZ at New Edwards was only possible because he had already made up his mind to kill, OZ had merely swapped his victims list.

Perhaps Zechs was correct in his self-imposed exile. But Noin ran off after him. According to Wufei, if a woman was willing to go beyond the ends of the earth for you, you'd be a fool to not at least try to hold on to her. Duo had joked that they should collect the guy's quotes for a manly self-help book. But Heero conceded that the man had a point.

Relena had followed him half way around the moon. He had held her only once.

It was after the third attempt on Relena's life in the eventful year of A.C.198, the Vice Foreign Minister was invited to a panel discussion on "The Merits of Different Systems of Government" at the university on L3, in conjunction with her diplomatic visit to the remote colony. A woman had rushed the stage during Q and A, brandishing a fiberglass garrotte. Years later psychologists would still be publishing white-papers about her brazenly medieval choice in murder weapon.

Heero made quick work of disposing the assailant, who was incapacitated and cuffed before the crowd could even react. It was an easier threat to take care of compared with snipers or explosives, the attackers being not very strong, but the effect was a lot more personal. Relena had seen her would-be killer face to face, and the malevolence she saw there shook her to the core.

Five hours later on the long shuttle ride back to earth, she was still shaking occasionally. Heero had switched the cabin lighting to night mode, and wrapped her in a blanket in an effort to sooth her nerves.

"We used to be a fierce people," she said to him in a hushed tone, "Northern European women defended their home and children, while their men sailed away raping and pillaging."

He sat down beside her, and looked at her in the dim light. He could make out the whites of her eyes before she squeezed them shut as she shook with another wave of shivers.

"Don't try to fight the physiological effects of shock." He had chided her softly, and put a hand across her back. She swallowed and continued speaking with a trembling voice.

"But we discovered chocolate, and the most aggressive thing we've done since then was invent cheap furniture with bad assembly instruction." It was hardly her best joke, but she kept speaking as if she was afraid of silence, terrible things lurked in the silence.

He put his other arm around her too, twisting in his seat so his torso faced her. She pressed her forehead against his cheek, strands of her hair tickled his lips.

"I'm just like her." She said against his shoulder, and inhaled uneasily.

For a moment, Heero couldn't follow her thoughts.

"I tried to take revenge for father." Relena's voice had turned into a whimper, as if her throat was welling up with tears instead of her eyes. "She's lost someone too Heero, I know that look in her eyes, I've seen it in the mirror."

He held her tighter, and didn't say a word.

"We're all broken people, capable of great evil." She hid her face against the side of his neck, and he felt her lips move when she spoke. "Take away the guns and the swords, and we'll still tear each other apart with our bare hands."

"We fight because there are some things in this world worth protecting." He pulled away from her enough to look at her in the low light, "The correct course of action is not always clear when that something is taken away. Vengeance is in every grieving heart that desires justice."

She shook her head, and freed her arms from the blanket to reach for him. Her dress shirt was unbuttoned at the wrists, and the soft skin of her forearms pressed against the nape of his neck. She tucked herself back into him.

"Grace and mercy."

He wasn't sure what she meant, but it sounded like she had found closure at least temporarily. There was a warm dampness on the skin of his neck that slowly spread to wet his collar.

Grace and mercy was what he held in his arms at that moment. He remembered noticing that every part of him touching her felt strange and a little painful, his heart constricted and caused him to take a hurried breath, his lungs filled with the scent of her.

The mini LED lamp flickered as it blinked out of batteries, sounds of the library returned to his ears, it brought Heero out of his reverie. He detached the dead lamp from the book and closed his readings with a sigh, he was not going to get through another page today. Damned Russian novelists and their long-winded, morally ambiguous tales.

He stood up from the carpeted floor, shook his legs of pins and needles. Instead of bringing books all the way down to the common reading area, he preferred plopping down directly under the shelf that housed whatever book he was currently reading. The hefty volume was carefully returned to its correct place, the Dewey system was archaic but effective.

He ran his fingers along the hardcover spines, and recalled the feeling of her skin against his own. How he craved that strange pain now, pain has been a good teacher all his life, it was his body's way of saying: this is important, pay attention.

He knew it to be a glimpse of something wonderful, if he dared to hope for it.

Heero stepped out of the library and into the simulated dusk, the colony temperature was set to a comfortable 15 degrees Celsius at night. The earth was visible above him, bright like the moon. He stood upside down on a celestial mathematician's dream, suspended between the pull of the sun and moon under his feet, and the tug of the planet over head.

We are sixty thousand miles apart, he often thought. How was it that her gravity could knock him out of his equilibrium across such great distances?