Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Broken Ties ❯ Blind Habbits ( Chapter 3 )

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing

Title: Broken Ties

Author: little princess

Archive: fanfiction.net mediaminer.og my personal website and GWFF yahoo group

Rating: PG13

Warnings: Friendship fic and I guess Angst. Talk about loved ones death in the last chapter yet not really a death fic I guess.

Pairings: it's a friendship fic, no real pairings, just the mention that they moved on and got married (non-yaoi) to OC's who don't play a big part here.

Summary: At the end of Endless Waltz, we are left not knowing what will happen to the gw boys. In this version, they remain friends for a couple of years, but in the end, their friendship seems to die like most friendships you have at such a young age do.

Blind Habits

Contact between the five of us became less and less after that Christmas where we forgot to invite Winner. I, too, am partially to blame for that, but like any human being, I sought excuses. My work got pretty heavy as we discovered a plot to revive certain mobile suits and it did take us a lot of time to take care of that. However, I see now that this should never have been an excuse to let my friendship with the others become such a thin line, to be broken so easily.

Winner's loss was a shame, but something told me that it had been his choice and I respected that. He had become distant over the past year anyway, always smiling, telling us the good part of his life while he left out things that went less than good. He used to be concerned when someone wrote lies or something bad about his company or himself, but lately he had been getting an attitude where he didn't seem to care. I thought he was just starting to grow into the hard business man he'd have to be if he wanted to keep his company up for the next fifty years or so.

But it wasn't that what was going on. Maybe somewhere deep down I realised it already, but as Winner and Maxwell were the ones who kept up the contacts, I didn't want to bother about it, figuring that Maxwell would be able to pull the blonde pilot back. Even after that Christmas I trusted Maxwell to make things right again, with his jester mask and his ever-cheerful optimism. Hell, even being captured by Oz didn't seem half as bad as it really was when Maxwell was there.

That was one compliment I had to give the annoying boy, he knew how to play his part. Like that time in outer space when we were captured and I was starting to be convinced that Barton had gone over the enemy. There had been a silent communication between pilot zerotwo and zerothree that I had missed, after which Maxwell conveniently gave Barton an opening to prove to the enemy that he was on their side while he gave us those updates on our gundams.

That was one clever bastard, Maxwell, even if he didn't look it. And so I counted on him to bring Winner back into our circle.

I realised, of course, that Maxwell was starting to mail me less and less. How could I not see it? Until recently he took pleasure in mailing me bombs that would overload my mailbox or other stupid jokes I did not appreciate and referred to as `childish'. Yet, when the ridiculous trips he'd planned for us, which we never really took anyway, and the occasional photos and tips-on-how-to-look-cooler stayed out as well, I was beginning to worry.

I contacted Yuy once and asked him when the last time was that he had heard from Duo and he told me that had been almost two months earlier. However, this was precisely the day before I got that huge assignment from Sally and thus I hardly had time to think about it.

The mission didn't go too bad, we accomplished our goal though it took us nearly three months to get everything done and in that time I had received no e-mail whatsoever from Duo and I hadn't mailed him either, telling myself I was too busy to do that. But then again, a mail only had to take five minutes.

So it was my fault that I didn't take the time to keep my friendship with Maxwell. However I didn't really miss him, since I'd met a girl on the job who worked for the preventors as well and I had fallen in love.

Love can be a dangerous thing, it can really make you blind. This time, not only was I blind towards my girl and did I find no flaw in her whatsoever in those first months, I was also too blind to realise that I still had friends to hang out with and one in particular, whom I had to mail now to get him back.

By the time I realised what I was doing, how much time I actually spent with Katie and how little I heard from anybody else who was not involved with my job, it was too late. After those first blind months, when we finally gave each other some time to breath by not spending every evening either in each other's touching company or else with each other on the phone anymore, I hadn't heard from Maxwell in six months and Winner had been gone even longer.

Of course, the latter was never gone for real as we saw his face on TV every now and then. I even found whole school projects on the guy, telling how he was only fifteen when he officially took over his father's business and how since then he had only made more money. We read about how he spent lots of money on charity and other events, how his company sponsored several sportsmen and sport teams and how he helped some companies save themselves from going under. That guy was always busy, so it was easier to let him go.

Maxwell, on the other hand, was a case not so simple. I had lost the guts to admit my failing him and thus I didn't dare to mail. I had always taken it for granted that he was the one to keep in contact and to let me know how the other guys were doing and suddenly, I had no idea what anyone was up to anymore. Was Barton still with the circus when he kept postponing his plans to leave? Was Yuy still a guard to Relena or had she found herself a husband yet? Well, I figured the latter one out pretty easily since everyone kept talking about the beautiful twenty-two-year-old single woman with more power and class than any other girl her age and the press loved hunting her down to scoop pictures of her with any guy and make it into yet another sappy gossip that she was engaged or something. Honestly, how people could still believe that crap was beyond me.

And Maxwell? Did he pass his third year and make it to his fourth and final year in college or did he fail as he feared he might?

I decided to wait for my birthday in December, knowing the braided one never missed a chance to congratulate anyone, but nothing came. Christmas went by without a word from the guy, same happened with new year.

It was now AC202 and Katie and I had broken up somewhere between my birthday and Christmas after a huge fight probably over something small since I can't remember it anymore. Suddenly I realised that I was indeed all alone. I hadn't spoken to Heero or Trowa either and without knowing it, I too had been on my way out of the group.

When I heard from Sally that she had a job for Heero, I wasted no time offering myself to inform him, even though normally I didn't take such easy jobs. Sally, always seeing right trough me, let me take this opportunity and I went to contact Heero. I decided to discuss details over a drink in a nearby bar and there we met. However, it didn't take long for me to realise that he had been closing himself down again.

He was always hard to hang out with, Heero Yuy. It took time for him to come and trust you, but we got there during the war, even to a point where he allowed himself to rely on me, on any of us pilots. After the war, when he didn't need to do that so much anymore, he took a step back, but Maxwell got him to stay close to us anyway. As we talked, though he tried to hide it, I saw that the loss of contact with the braided pilot had done him more harm than good. He really missed the presence of that boy he once called `friend' before he had called anyone else just that. They'd had such a deep friendship, deeper even than I thought it had been, and here I was, sitting with Yuy, seeing the pain it caused him to even hear the boy's name.

Anger rose in me, anger at the braided boy who had not carried out his duty, his mission to keep the five of us together. I see now how stupid it was of me to assume that he would do all the work while we just got annoyed by him and told him more than once to stop. Because when he did stop, non of us took over.

After that one job, I lost contact with Heero as well when I got transferred to some colony far away to do my work from there. I had never been best friends with Barton, in fact, he was the only one I didn't really try to keep in contact with in the first place, so now I realised I had lost them all. Quatre was the first of us to jump out and his doing that had scattered us all. We meant nothing if we weren't all five of us together.

Nine years back, I met a girl, Kayo and five years ago we got married. Next week is our first lustrum feast and for that occasion, I had tried to seek contact with Duo Maxwell again, hoping that he would forgive my foolishness and help me in my attempt to get the five of us together again. This action was inspired by my pregnant wife, who had lost her parents last year. She told me I would regret it if I didn't do it, and she was right.

My hacking skills weren't as good as they once were when I was eighteen or so, but still I knew enough to find out that he no longer had an e-mail address. Every trace of him I could find ended somewhere within the last five years when he was teaching at a college somewhere in America. At that time he was married to his first-ever girlfriend, Hilde Schbeiker, whom he had lost contact with at the age of 17, but obviously ran into ten years later.

What happened to Maxwell, I don't know. Maybe he changed his identity, maybe he turned out to be gay, divorced Hilde, married a man and took his last name, or maybe he simply didn't want to be found. I couldn't track him down and now I have regrets. If only I had tried this thirteen years ago, if only I hadn't allowed him to not keep in touch, if only… but it is too late. Maxwell is nowhere to be found and I dare not contact any of the others, out of fear of finding the same results.

Oh Nataku, such a coward I have become!

Chang Wufei. Pilot 05 of Nataku

AC 215 November 6th.