Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ 10 Seconds ❯ zygomatic arch ( Chapter 6 )

Chapter 6 zygomatic arch

I don’t remember falling asleep. I don’t remember lying down in bed, I don’t remember kicking off my shoes, I don’t remember putting my hand around the handle of the door and twisting it in the dead quiet corridor, with Duo at my back. I don’t remember when he followed me in and softly closed the door behind him, easing it shut with his palm against the frame until the metal clicked into place. I don’t remember feeling jealous of that door, of how it still retained its logical place in life, while mine had been tossed out of the boat and now floated away from me, deeper and deeper into the green-blue murk.

I don’t remember Duo stepping in the bathroom again, nor the starchy white cast of the lights that poured out from it. I don’t remember blandly standing at the side of my neatly made bed for what could have been five minutes, or a blink of an eye. How could it even be possible to count the ten elusive moments I so desperately needed to obtain from Duo only a short time ago.

Since then things have changed in ways I can’t even think to describe. I think I am feeling the age of my war.

I don’t remember the sound of the faucet running hot water, nor the way the bed staggered back in forth in my vision, nor my knees giving way to my legs, allowing my body to swing as it would please and put me crookedly on the bed.

I don’t remember the sensation of heat following me, even as I lie there, completely clothed, nor the coolness of the sheets on my face, nor the uncomfortable throbbing of the soles of my feet. I don’t remember the passage of time between when the starchy white light left and when Duo’s thumb touched the front of my top lip and pressed, smearing all the way to the side of my face, just below my ear.

I don’t remember these things because they were simply lost in the abrupt surge of adrenaline and heat that went straight to the center of my chest and the pit of my stomach. I stiffen up beneath the touch, eyes closed, shoulders hunching, lips pulling back and teeth setting in defense.

Duo’s low voice cuts in, halting the response. "Hey," he whispers in that cool, deep tone. This sound is not his eyes talking to me this time. "Shh. You’re tired. Go back to sleep, buddy, okay?" The mattress is now sinking beneath added weight, but the sensation is like a whispering ocean wave with my eyes closed, and gentler.

For a moment, I can forget the adrenaline surging to my heart and simply heed that voice, obey that easily followed command, and not think about anything but Duo’s thumb touching the skin where my jaw begins into my neck. But he can sense it, almost as if he could hear it in the dark, and I can hear him smirk at me in that half-reproachable way I imagine him.

"I’m not going to hurt you. You know that," he says, lifting his thumb. His fingers are set against the jut of my jaw, steadying themselves for another touch. I shiver. Duo doesn’t say anything for another moment. The cool, slightly oily texture of the paint rolls off my skin onto his, and again, as his touch travels up the curve of my cheekbones.

"You’re so tired," he murmurs suddenly, almost causing me to flutter my eyes open to look at him, but he puts his thumb gently to the corner of one and grazes it around the zygomatic arch beneath. I am almost gone again at this, drifting away from reality and into something much less colorful and loud. But something pulls me back to the surface of a deep dark lake in which I’d been sinking, trying to break my daze with oxygen and tell me something.

Duo’s weight moves again. I don’t know where, but I feel it. And it somehow comforts me when I feel it again as he shifts. His hand moves away, then comes back a few moments later, warm, not cool anymore. Clean.

"Get some sleep, Heero."

I push a sound against the back of my lips, which are comfortably sealed together in the same exhausted contract of my eyelids, and he makes one in return. "Yeah, buddy," he says, the distant laughter in his voice the last thing guiding me downwards into the water again, "me too."

I wonder what he was as well, but I am gone, whether he would come with me or not.