Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing, which is a registered trademark of Sotsu Agency Co., LTD. TM & Sunrise & under license by Bandai.
A/N- This was written for the gw_dark LJ community prompts; this month's prompt is: realistic despair, a psychological fist in the face, a PTSD theme, homelessness, abject poverty, having no options left, and/or the-world-was-better-at-war. Bonus points for: smex, spanking, darkfluff.
Blue Moon
by Terra
When he hears the sirens and sees the flashing red lights, his first instinct is to cut and run. But then he remembers that it's peacetime now and it's not his face on wanted posters. Sensational war crimes have long given way to crimes more mundane and easily ignored. It's the rapist attacking elderly women who is public enemy number one now. So he doesn't run. He walks to the police cars and ambulance parked in front of his apartment complex and he arrives just in time to hear the collective murmurs of horror in the crowd and see a body bag being wheeled down the steps.
"They're saying it's that – what's his name? – that Carster guy. From 407—" he hears someone whisper, scandalized. He doesn't stay to hear the rest; he is running, pushing through the crowd, ignoring the annoyed voices behind him, shoving his way out until he's standing in front of the paramedic, strangely winded, with his hands locked on the cool metal handles of the gurney.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing?" the paramedic shouts but it's too late and Duo is unzipping the bag and everyone can see the dead face of Ray Carson from 407. Someone screams. Someone – an officer, he thinks – shoves him away from the body and yells threats, a baton whizzing in the air.
"I knew him," he says distantly and he thinks he should not be this shell-shocked because if he were honest with himself, he knew this was coming. He repeats: "I knew him. He was my friend."
And then the gurney is being lifted into the ambulance and the doors are slammed shut and when it drives away, its lights are no longer flashing. The silence seems to say: not an emergency, nothing important here – just another suicide. The crowd thins out, people shooting him dirty looks as they pass, and he numbly climbs the stairs to his apartment. But when he reaches for the doorknob, he suddenly realizes he is outside 407 and the door is ajar. He ignores the yellow tape and walks in. The living room is exactly the way he remembers it; the tattered, floral-patterned couch obnoxiously out-of-place in the center of the room and he remembers Ray telling him fondly: "The wife made me buy this piece of junk. She's crazy about flowers – that nut."
Duo recalls noticing something strange in his accent. "Where are you from?"
"Earth," answers Ray vaguely. "That's where the missus is now. And my little girl." He pulls out his wallet and shows Duo a picture of a girl with crooked teeth and freckles and love in her eyes. "You from around here?"
"Born and raised," he nods.
Ray snorts. "How do you put up with this shit? You got to recycle everything. I'm drinking my own damn urine and everything smells like burnt plastic. I haven't had fresh food in weeks. Everything's in a goddamn can."
"You get used to it."
"Horsepiss. I've been here two months and it don't get any better," he grumbles. "When I got to this orbiting hellhole, they pumped me so full of drugs I thought they'd mistaken me for a cancer patient. They told me I might feel sore. I'm still sore."
Duo laughs at the prickly way he says this. "Can't help it. We don't want some Terran virus to wipe us out."
"You guys got any common sense – you don't vaccinate yourself to the nines. You tough it out and then you don't have to cower from every cough or sneeze."
"There's not much common sense to go around. At least not on L2. We've had too many viral epidemics where the Alliance abandoned us. And people have a long memory. You can thank the Alliance for the prejudice against dirty Terrans."
Ray curses. "Who's dirty? You guys eat and drink your own shit."
"We eat and drink our own shit," he corrects, smiling.
Duo never sees Ray outside the apartment building. He is always smoking on the fire escape or slumped in the halls with a bottle of whiskey or limping to the roof with his lame leg to look at the fake stars. It is three weeks after he meets Ray that he is asked: "How come you never ask what I'm doing here?"
"I figure you have your reasons." Duo shrugs. "It's none of my business if you don't want to tell me."
"There's somethin' different about you."
"Yeah?"
"You fought in the war, didn't you?"
Duo is surprised. He looks down at his casual attire – jeans, sneakers and ratty t-shirt – and knows he has done nothing to make anyone notice him. "How can you tell?"
"You're young. Too young to have that look. Like you've been scared shitless and don't know how to make anything matter anymore," he pauses. "And you smile too damn much."
"You a veteran?" he asks carefully.
Ray nods curtly. "Alliance. Before those OZ fuckers overthrew us. Shot us clean in the back. Never saw it coming. Then I got drafted to fight the White Fang."
"I was—" he pauses, considering. "I fought for the Colonies."
"I figured. The way you colonists tell it, everyone's a goddamn patriot. I thought I'd come here. See what it's like to be a hero, get a new start. Away from the same political bullshit, the same goddamn hypocrisy. But this place ain't any different from Earth."
"You don't sound thrilled to discover our common humanity," drawls Duo, amused.
"Horseshit. That's just fancy rhetoric that don't mean nothin'."
"You planning to go back someday?"
"Yeah, well — I got to see my kid, don't I?" answers Ray, squinting at something over Duo's shoulder and his face changes, begins to crumble and he knows that Ray is staring at something that only he can see. The unconscious gesture is private, too private, to include anyone else. Duo considers it his cue to leave.
The first time Duo finds him on the roof, Ray is standing near the edge looking down. "Bit of a drop," he comments.
"Yeah," agrees Duo.
Then he looks up at the sky and scoffs: "You call that a moon? It ain't any better than my halogen lamp."
"You should see the energy bill for that halogen lamp," says Duo, smiling. "But the Terrans lobbied hard for it, so there it is."
"What's the goddamn point if it's always a full moon?"
"Isn't that how you guys like it?" asks Duo curiously.
Ray retorts: "What gave you that idea? The moon's never full for more than a day on Earth. You ever hear the expression: once in a blue moon?"
"I might have read it somewhere."
"That's when there are two full moons in a month. It means somethin's rare when you say it happens once in a blue moon. That's why it's beautiful. Why we sentimental Terrans write poems and books about it. Because it's something we only get to see once every twenty-nine days. It builds and builds and then it fades and we get to start over again. You might see twenty-some blue moons your entire life. Your entire life. What the hell is the goddamn point of writing poetry and books about a light you turn on every night?"
Duo considers this. "I guess we forgot about that when we became colonists. There's no room for sentiment in space. Life is too hard."
"Nah. We've always got room for sentiment. I've seen what passes for quality programming around here," says Ray, disgusted. "This – this handing us something we want and then laughing behind our backs...it's just spitting in our faces. It's appeasement but it's appeasement on your terms. Here's your precious moon but we're going to make it worthless to you. Isn't that how you colonists think of us?"
"Not everyone. But people still remember what it was like to live under the Alliance. They're trying to make themselves different, create some distance."
"Not bloody likely to happen. This place may smell like a dung heap but we all stink the same. Put a bunch of people anywhere and you'll get the same problems, kill for the same things, fight the same wars — and you call that different?"
Once, Duo finds Ray unconscious on the stairwell. People step over him all morning and all afternoon and when Duo sees him at night, he heaves him over his shoulder and sets him down on his ugly floral couch. Then he goes into the kitchen and roots through the garbage that has piled everywhere, the dirty dishes spilling out of the sink, the torn-open rations containers vomiting out of the cupboards, to find a glass. He fills it with water from the tap; then he upends it on Ray's face. When he suddenly startles awake, his eyes bloodshot and stance tense, he leaps up and charges Duo.
His reflexes save him in time and he shouts: "Ray! It's me! It's Duo. Ray, stop!"
But Ray can't hear him and he is a blur of violence and erupted rage. Duo dodges another blow with enough force to break bone and he starts to feel his heart pounding in that familiar rhythm he has tried to forget. Duo is afraid to touch him; he doesn't know how to stop him without killing – without hurting, only hurting – him. When Ray's shoulder shoves into his side, he has finally had enough. He waits for the right moment, sees an opening, punches him in the jaw – but not too hard – and Ray falls down, staggering from his own momentum. Duo tries again: "Stand down! Stand down, soldier!"
It takes a minute but Ray's eyes, still full from the things only he can see, finally focuses on Duo. He croaks, "It's you. I thought—"
"No," he interrupts.
Ray slowly stands, wheezing. "Sorry 'bout that," he slurs. "I thought you was someone else."
"You're drunk."
"Yeah," he grins unabashedly. "I am. You wan' some?"
"That's enough. Where's your wife?" asks Duo shortly.
"She's on Earth. With my Lily. Didn't I tell you?"
"Where on Earth?"
"Nowhere. I don't know. Won't let me touch her, won't let me see her. Says she can't trust me no more. Isn't that funny?" Ray laughs mirthlessly, his eyes bleak. "Can't trust me. Trusted me to save her life, didn't she?"
"You don't want to go down this road, Ray. Trust – trust me. The booze, the drugs," he sees the little dots running up and down arms that are always covered, "it won't change anything. You might forget for a while. Maybe it buys you an hour or two of quiet but then you wake up and if you're lucky, everything's still the same. You need and need until it burns away everything and it's all you can think about. And it will never – it will never stop."
"Who said anythin' about stoppin'?" he asks, still grinning and shoots Duo an indulgent look, his eyes fluttering, eyelids heavy.
Duo sighs, raking his hand through his hair in frustration, still coiled with tension, his heart thundering in his ears. He is still too dangerous and he never, never wants to paint the walls red again. He orders: "Go to sleep. You don't understand anything I'm saying. But we're doing something about this in the morning."
The night before he puts a gun in his mouth and swallows a bullet, Ray comes to say goodbye. But Duo doesn't know it then. All he knows is that Ray is sober, that he is clean and shaven and the dishes are washed. He thinks that maybe he is doing better, but he should have known. "Hey, thanks. You did good with me. Knew how to handle me right," he tells Duo.
"I've been there," he responds tersely.
"Yeah? Yeah, that makes sense." Before Ray disappears down the hall, he looks back and his blue eyes seem to burn in the dark corridor. A smile – it starts strained, a too-practiced quirking of the lips, but then it blossoms into a curving red gash, the corners creased and his eyes wrinkled and it is a genuine, genuine smile – stretches his face. "Don't wait up for me," he says finally. "I'll be seeing you."
Standing in the empty apartment, looking at the clean kitchen and the emptied garbage and the neatly stacked cans, Duo thinks about his dismal record of trying to save people. Or maybe it's just that he can't stay away from people who don't want to be saved. This is his new addiction – the clean despair of people with nothing to lose, who fill him, give him hope because he is not there yet. As his eyes trace the explosion of flowers masquerading as furniture, he notices a small note tucked in the cushion. The crooked handwriting is unfamiliar but there's only one person who could've written it.
"The couch is yours," he reads. "Take good care of it or I'll sic the ex-wife on you."
Stunned, he starts laughing and he feels a pressure that builds and builds in his chest until his face is red, and it is a good red, until he can't remember what it was like to force out dishonest laughs. That is what he likes best about Ray. He always tried to make him laugh. He was the jokester – so that Duo didn't have to be, he suddenly realizes. He thinks he knows now what those parting words meant. Don't wait up for me. "I won't. Wait anymore." I'll be seeing you. "Yeah. I'll be seeing you."
Duo smiles and it is his first real smile in a long time because, like Ray said, he smiles too much. "But not too soon."
-
A/N- My first piece on Duo. I've avoided writing him for years because he's just so hard to understand. Sure, he's great comedic relief in any story but writing him seriously? Definitely intimidated me. But the prompt this month demanded that I suck it up and write this so...there it is. If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts and constructive criticism. These "darker" stories are still new territory for me. Thanks for reading!