Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Time ❯ Duo's Story ( Chapter 6 )

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Jack, Gundam Wing, Backstreet Boys (Or their songs) or anything else I happen to use in this fic.

//Time, look where we are and what we've been through

(look where we are)

Time, sharing our dreams (dreams, dreams, dreams, oh yeah)

Time, (goes on and on) goes on and on everyday (everyday)

Time is what it is (Oh)

Come what may (come what may)//

Duo:

I am glad that Wufei found his happiness with Quatre and Trowa. Their relationship is going to be some balanced. It's strange, but I don't think that if they had still been the people they were during the wars they would have completed each other as perfectly as what they seem to do now.

Even though Heero and I made a really big deal about it, I know that he's as happy as I am. We're the jokers of the family that the five of us have become.

I sometimes miss being the only light in the group. I really enjoyed being the only one who could bring a smile to everyone's face, including Wufei's, after a long and bloody battle. I wouldn't give up until I had received even the smallest flicker of a true, happy smile from everyone.

Not that my smile had been real then. After all that I had been through, how could my smile ever be real? It was a mask hiding my depression and self loathing. Heero was the only one who saw through it, who tried to make me act like myself.

I still use masks to hide myself, but doesn't everyone? It's my belief that there aren't many people at all who put themselves, their real selves, out on display for all to enjoy. It's equivalent to stripping off all of your clothes and asking people what they think. Heero has seen the real me.

After the wars were over and Heero was sure that the threat to peace was over he was lost. Totally lost. I was lost as well, as I didn't have a reason to be that happy. We were both lost in a new world that we knew nothing about. I resorted to drugs, going clubbing, getting drunk and high.

I found Heero at one of the bars that I frequented because of the quality of the drugs that was sold there. He was sitting at the bar, stabbing himself with a toothpick, of all things. I didn't realise that it was really him because of the drugged state I was in. But once Heero saw me, he took me to his hotel and helped me recover. Once I was lucid, I couldn't believe Heero. He was numerous scars, knife slashes, burns, careless grazes and cuts. But I knew that I had to help him. It was what I needed to do and it gave me a purpose. However, because of my withdrawal, I couldn't help him to begin with. He help me instead. He dragged me to every place where I had let what had happened in the past, in another time, drag me down.

The final place he dragged me was the ruins of the Maxwell Church. I sat and cried for a whole hour, finally letting the past stay in the past. I pulled out a small dagger after I had finished crying. I grasped my braid in my hand, took a deep breath and sliced through the thick strands. My hair had fallen unevenly about my face as I sat on my knees with my head bowed. I threw the braid on the ground and smashed my lighter on it. I watched it burn.

That was my final act of letting go. After that Heero held me for a while then we had made our way back to the hotel that we were staying in. After that, I had taken Heero on a little journey of his own.

Once we had both put our pasts behind us our feelings for each other had deepened. We had seen beyond the masks that are common place protection and hadn't been repulsed by what we found. We had both found someone who was so alike as to be a twin, and yet so different that we could have been a member of a different kingdom (biological kingdom, of course).

Now, the masks that we use to help protect us from the real world are almost identical. We never wear them when we are in private, however. That is one thing that we will never do. It's our faith and trust in each other that allows us to do this.

It's strange to think that someone as stoic and mission obsessed as Heero could ever have shown one of the happiest (to all outward appearances) person how to live. He showed me, the life of the group, how to truly laugh. The thought crosses my mind everyday that I have to thank him from saving me from my half existence, but the words can never form in my mouth. Perhaps he already knows.

~~

Once upon a time my only dream was to get off the streets. No, wait, before that my only dream was to not be an orphan, for my parents to magically appear and reclaim me as their own. Then my dream was to get off the streets. While the first dream never came true, the second one did. Maxwell church saved me.

That was how all of my dreams progressed. Alternating between coming true and not. One after another. It's a shame that so much of my early life was wasted dreaming. But I wouldn't change it - I am who I am because of it.

I might regret some of my decisions one day. But I know that as long as I keep close to my heart the fact that it's passed and I can never go back, I know that it can't bother me to much. Heero told me what one of his mentor's last messages to him was - follow your emotions and you can never regret what you have done. So I think I will follow that advice for the rest of my life.

What's in the past should stay in the past - time is what it is. Heero's first true, heartfelt message to me when I cried in front of him for the first time will say with me forever.