Title: Fact and Fiction
Author: Karina
Rating: PG
Pairing: Wu Fei + Duo + Milliardo
Notes: Challenge 218. Baby Series 4 #111. Takes place a few minutes following He Believed.
Spoilers: None
Warnings:
Many thanks to ShenLong Deb for her work betaing this set of fics.
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the Characters from the series but the baby is mine.
Title: Fact and Fiction
Wu Fei glanced up as the door opened, watching as the mane of pale blonde hair glinted in the artificial lighting. It was one of the nights he remained to work late and not return to his people. A night where he haunted the attic, languished in Duo's company, and savoured every scrap of time he garnered with the King.
He did work late these few nights, catching up on paperwork and having long discussions on the future. There was so much to cram into a few hours and he almost felt guilty for taking what time he could garner in the attic, savouring the time he could spend with the two men who were steadily becoming the focus of his world.
It was wrong to place them above the needs of his position and especially his people, but it was something he could not change. He wanted to do no more than be with them, watching, growing closer to them. Loving them.
"I thought you would have been watching the special." Duo straightened up from the chest he had been inspecting, rubbed at his back and settled back against a support beam to watch the King.
"It is precisely what I expected it to be. I could not take watching it any longer."
The Legend was growing, fed by spin doctors who were not exactly inclined to give credence to the factual truth. History was full of it and Wu Fei knew it. It was isolated to no particular culture, this doctoring of the truth to lend the desired slant to past events. It was lamentable though. He had at one stage been intent on being a scholar, but the more he had read the more inconsistencies he found. He had learned, before he had had his life changing moment, that history lied.
Yet behind each legend, each myth, there was always at least a single grain of truth.
"That bad, huh?" Duo nodded absently, glancing around the attic. "Well then, anyone for a cup of coffee, tea or chocolate? Something stronger, maybe?"
They had been known to enjoy something far stronger than tea on these nights and looking at Milliardo, at the haunted look in those clear crystal eyes, he could see that they might just be indulging in a little something to take the edge off haunting memories of a time not so long past.
He had killed that man. He was the one who had killed him and given the spin doctors and power brokers the chance to graft a new legend filled with falsehoods and deception. It was he who had snuffed out that life in the fire of his youth, not understanding why anything had been done, not thinking, merely reacting.
As had been expected of him.
It was much better to think before he struck out, but age granted wisdom and one needed to make mistakes to know that one lived and learned.
Sadly people died in the greatest mistake of all. War.
End
Karina Robertson 2013