Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ 10 Seconds ❯ a paper bird ( Chapter 5 )

Chapter 5 a paper bird

For a moment, I truly do not care should the perimeter guard casually glance downwards into the foliage and catch sight of me, not daring to breathe on the cold, black shine of his shoes. For a moment, it erases my primitive survival drive, this subconscious agony I have been trying to avoid unearthing this evening and putting myself at the mercy of the violet eyes lurking in memory.

Warm, calm breaths leave my body, countered an even second and a half later by an equally controlled intake of turbulently cold night air. The dew-ridden grass gently brushes my jaw, running terribly ticklish lines down the front of my neck.

But I must not make a noise. I should care if I do, but momentarily, the concern leaves me. For a moment, I almost wish he would. I am staring up into the cleaned barrel of his issue rifle as it swings idly at his hip, just inches above my head.

Maybe then Duo would care.

The foliage is gone again, the stars melting away into an earlier time. For the countless time that night, my higher, functioning brain leaves the dim, animalistic one in the wet, cold grass, and I am again in that room.

By no means would I describe myself as capable of excessive bouts of emotion—and even if I would, to admit such weakness would be blasphemous to the will to survive—but I hate that room. Even now I dread the return to those four walls. Perhaps that is partly why a section of my mind even hopes for the guard to catch sight of me. I am there again, despite myself, despite my best efforts. The cold starlight hanging over the munitions storehouse becomes the cold starlight painting the dorm where Duo and I stand at opposite sides of the room.

He is standing near the wall, standing over the array of weapons he has laid out. To a rhythm only he truly understands, he is picking up guns and rearranging them, running his fingers along the cold metal before putting it away in a case and shutting them when they grow full.

Every time he bends down, I watch the mist of lunar light paint his back in the dark, where his braid shifts ever so slightly with each movement.

I have been watching him for some time, but he has been silent even longer than that.

I don’t make it policy to dig where I don’t belong when it comes to the other pilots. Of the few I’ve met, Duo is the only with whom I have any semblance of a true human relation, and, as he would say, I don’t want to fuck it up.

But I know what happened. The words don’t serve a purpose. They would only serve to irritate the situation more should we exchange them.

The bruise isn’t fading much, but the darkness conceals it. After he had sufficiently locked himself in the bathroom, I had gone determinedly back to my laptop. My only source for a sense of control in an increasingly uncomfortable tension between us. After a few minutes, I knew had opened the window and, scaling the two stories to the ground below, gone out. To where? Somewhere without me. And to do what? Something without me.

I couldn’t stop him from doing it. I had no right to, I had no need to. But something in me, something that could not abandon life and fade away but instead remained, writhing and fighting for breath in my body, wanted to know.

He came back a few hours later, still sporting a smart bruise from the miscreant student who’d bestowed it upon him for pickpocking his smokes—a humiliation unadmittable for a war pilot of Duo’s caliber—and opened the bathroom door. He looked at me, typing on my computer but only in a hollow way, and then went to work preparing for the mission.

And eventually, I found myself on the other end of the room. Supposedly preparing, but only darkly watching my hands move without me. No longer could I ignore him and push myself to the task at hand and him out of mind.

He was far too powerful for that, scowling every other moment at my mind’s eye, cigarette pinched in his mouth.

And now the room becomes a long track of black cold, ever-lengthening.

I hate this.

I am not emotional, but I hate it.

Duo would say, "fucking hate it."

But Duo does not have anything to say to me anymore. And therefore, I have no one to listen to.

A paper bird I am likened to, and breakable, all of a sudden.

A distant explosion takes me away from myself and throws me into myself. Not so distant anymore, the boiling hot orange-yellow fire leaps into the sky in terrifying amounts, bursting forth from the roof of the storehouse in angry punches. They scald the icy stars above, hiding the lowest in a broiling, rippling blanket of heat, spreading outward from the force of the detonation. Like the tiniest touches of an artist’s ink brush, the debris floats black and delicate against the shifting, swirling, hellish color. In reality they are tremendous, jagged chunks of superheated metal, able to sear my skin off with a casual brush.

But reality seems to be running away with me lately.

The guard instinctively cringes away from the eruption of light and the concussion of heat and power that follows moments later. The orange light burns on the edges of his uniform and he lunges toward the ground, out of control, gun rattling on his hip from the movement. From my nest on the ground, barely hidden from anything, the shock wave moves overhead, and I lurch up a moment later.

He falls now, his windpipe crushed, into the foliage where I had laid. For a moment, I stand there in the orange hell of light and heat Duo has set into motion, no true fault of his own, and look at the soldier. His beret has fallen loose from the assault, lies in the grass, and reveals his scruffy, young hair. He lies in my soft impression, dying without knowing it.

I was lying in his coffin, and took him when I decided. The idea sends cold down my spine while the explosion sends heat melting down my back.

Is that what Duo thinks about when he talks about Death?

Or does he think about me?

That’s the thought that comes to mind as I lift my head and glance over at the black figure beside me now, registering in my mind as that of Duo’s familiar face but not in my mind that it is him, watching me cautiously. The black smears of paint decorating his face are strange looking, I think, but it is his expression that is truly strange.

"Heero." The sound makes me shiver again, but this time it is a warm back and a warm spine.

It is the third time when I respond.

Duo is standing a few feet away and staring at me. Not in an odd way, but in a sad and old way. "You’ve been here for five minutes," he tells me, but I’m not sure he’s really telling me. It could just be his eyes. "Let’s go."