Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Creed Arc ❯ The Creed: Enough ( Chapter 3 )

Author notes: Hi everyone! Just a few thankyous…To Arithkenshin, for her wonderful reviews and the audacity with which she follows my work. It is fresh water in the dam. To Dark Princess, who seems to have a keen eye on this story, for Lita who was kind enough to give me ten's despite all those stuff ups in Impervious!! And to golden rat who I seem to confuse a hell of a lot but who keeps coming back for more. Thank you for reading this fic, it is much appreciated. Hope you enjoy the next part! Kkls, Leth

www.geocities.com/lethanon

-Enough-

"How long?"

"Four months."

Four months and all I remembered was Wufei. The touch of his lips on my forehead, the burning feel of his words as they tore through my brain. Well, okay, so that wasn't the only thing. There was Wufei, and there was pain. So much pain I remembered nothing else. I did not recall how hard I had fought against everything the doctors had tried to do to save me. I did not even remember hitting the ground. Just pain, as if it is all I have ever known. It's not, but some times…some days…happiness just doesn't seem enough.

He is with me now, Wufei. I want him to leave, to let me go, to let me fade away as if I never was, but he won't go. I know that now. I have tried everything my sordid imagination could think of; I've worn every mask. He ignores them all, flicking some invisible switch inside his head and simply ignoring every antic I concoct. He doesn't care what I say, or do, or don't say, or don't do. All that matters to him is that he is here, with me, when he thinks I need him. He doesn't understand that if he wants me to be happy he has to leave. He has to, or they're all going to die. It's my curse; my blood; my life. I am Shinigami.

"Leave?"

No reply. I knew there wouldn't be. I was running on empty and he knew it. He had weathered the greatest of storms and for some deranged reason I still expected the small after wind to blow him away. Such a fool am I.

He's a good person. I know that now. I didn't know it before. I didn't know this man at all. He was a vague shadowy figure on the edge of my existence, the one I didn't care for. He was the only one I had not needed to work on. I didn't need to push Wufei away because he had never been there to begin with. It was the others, Quatre Heero Trowa, who I needed to force to hate me. I made them happy, all the while planting the seeds that would turn them against me. Stupidly, I had never planted such seeds in Wufei.

And here he was, the one I had ignored as easily as he had ignored me, the only one left at my side. Ironic? No. Just life. Plain and simple.

I am so tired it probably hurts. I wouldn't know. I've been on the morphine so long it will take weeks to get it out of my system. That's assuming I can still go cold turkey. I will; I always do. There is one good thing to come out of all this. The pain is nothing now, because I know what real pain is. I've been to the most intense realm of agony and I was dragged back again. With Wufei holding my hand.

I am frowning at him, my darkest most feral scowling face, but he is ignoring me. Hell, it almost seems to amuse him. I have underestimated my `friend'. I should have known better. I should have remembered…

You see, Wufei is rather familiar to me now I know him. He has the same sense of right and wrong as another I once knew. One who I loved, and who died because of that. Wufei reminds me of Father Maxwell. Calm, ready, all knowing. There is a peace to Wufei that I can only call divine. It makes it so hard to keep going; to keep pushing him away.

"Quatre tried to teach Heero how to make pancakes this morning."

It seemed a very strange thing to tell me. In fact, most of what Wufei told me seemed strange, pointless, rather silly. I didn't even believe half of it! I mean, honestly. Heero, making pancakes? Heero wouldn't even eat the damned things. In Heero's opinion pancakes were not healthy and subsequently bad for the mission. I snorted in reply and Wufei's ear pricked up. I could have hit myself; I had responded.

We had been playing this game for two weeks. Two weeks since I had first regained consciousness to find myself abandoned into the care of Wufei. Even the doctors didn't bother to come see me any more, leaving my care in the capable hands of the psycho gundam pilot. Why were they ever helping us? I didn't really want to know.

Two weeks of Wufei trying to coax me out of my dark shell. I knew what he wanted and I had given it to him full force; the joker's mask. It had slipped into place like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, only there was no one left to perform for. The joker had never played for Wufei. What did he expect? What did he want? What would make him happy? I still didn't know. So I had played, again and again, manipulating the mask in every way until I had finally been forced to admit defeat. Whatever Wufei wanted was not in the mask, but in the man behind it, and that man was dead, I was sure, or as close to it as you could get.

"Heero burnt them black," Wufei continued. "Then when he tried to flip them over he used too much force. We now have big black dots on our ceiling. Trowa tried to get them off, but they're stuck there."

Something almost like a laugh escaped me. I was so shocked I couldn't reply if I had wanted to. I had not heard myself laugh in years. Not since Maxwell Church. Was that what my laughter sounded like? Not the mask's laugh, but mine…It was almost…nice.

Silence reigned for the longest time. I waited for the darkness to come claim me, but it was slow and sluggish, as if the drugs had affected it somehow. It made me nervous and I fidgeted with the sheet beneath my fingertips. The crash had changed me. The doctors had done their best to put me back together, and they had done a perfect job…physically. But something wasn't right inside. There was a little fire trapped inside me and it wanted to get out.

"The doctor says you can come home soon."

When did the safe house become home? Why were they still there, after four whole months? Surely OZ should have found them by now? Surely Heero had lost his temper and killed them all! But no, they were all there, living as normally as gundam pilots can, waiting for me.

For me. What had I done?

`We love you get well.' Just the thought of the memory almost drove me to despair. What had gone wrong? How had that happened? How had it come to this? Surely I was wrong, I hadn't heard correctly. It was just an illusion, a stupid desire. I had to believe it was the drugs. Nothing else was acceptable.

"I don't have a home," I heard myself say damn near choking on the words. I wanted to bite my tongue but my body would not obey, it just kept blabbing. "It's burned to the ground, and my family are dead. The fire in the disease killed them first, then the fire with the flames got the rest. They're all gone. The church is gone. I'm all that's left, and I'll make them pay."

Wufei was looking at me, and for the first time in two weeks I realised I had gotten a reaction. His onyx eyes were shimmering, glazed with emotion. His fingers shook as he rested them against my cheek. He wanted to say something, I knew, but what do you say to someone like me? Say you are happy and that you don't love me. That is all you have to say. It's not that hard is it?

"Take me home."

Wufei nodded, switching off the machine, removing the various stabbing little devices that had for months been embedded in my skin. They left gaping red holes in me that made me want to retch. Instead I just lay there, patiently waiting.

Wufei dressed me in black pants and a black shirt. They were comfortable, like satin, smooth and cool on my heated flesh. When he was satisfied Wufei left to sign whatever forms needed to be filled out before returning. He wrapped me in a blanket and carried me from the place I wish had been a tomb. He took me from my death, lifted me from the darkness that to all intents and purposes had abandoned me when he used that word. Love. They love me, and they want me to be well. But if they love me, and I'm still breathing, they are all going to die.

I was silent in the car. It unnerved Wufei. I don't know why. I would have thought by now he was used to it, used to me just lying there saying nothing, unmoving, eyes pleading for him to leave, or kill me, or both. Yet here we were, sitting in silence, going back to the safe house; going `home'. I sneered at the landscape that slid by as if it had somehow betrayed me. The land had failed to swallow me whole when I had crashed into it.

Thinking of the crash made me realise the one thing I had failed to ask. I turned to Wufei and I heard his breath hitch in anticipation. He probably thought I was going to snarl cruel words about his dead wife. He should have known, I knew it would never work. In Wufei's mind Meiran was untouchable, her divinity unquestionable. I could not affect him with words ill spoken of what he had lost and more than he could effect me.

"Deathscythe?"

Wufei's brows shot up and his body visibly recoiled from the question. Still, he could sense the importance of truth in his reply and he did not shy from it.

"The sweepers have rebuilt your Gundam. It took all their resources, but I think Howard enjoyed every minute of it. It is, however, missing one particular system."

The one I had used to make my buddy dance. We would never move in that final sequence together again…If I came close to the end then I would face it alone. I had lived again, only to ensure that death, when it came, would be all the more cold, all the more lonely, all the more empty. I am cursed. Why can't I accept it?

The house came into view. It looked brighter than it had. Strange, when I had not been there to make them laugh and see the goodness in their lives. It made the efforts I had made all the more useless. I had tried to show them happiness and instead had given them a friend they loved, damn them. I had tried to make them safe and put them in the greatest danger. How had the safe house not been discovered? My mind boggled.

They didn't come out to meet me. They stayed hidden, but I could hear them as Wufei carried me to my room and tucked me into bed. He left quietly, and I heard the creaking footsteps retreat to the kitchen, where for the first time in four months I heard their voices. Trowa, Quatre, Heero. Why hadn't they come to see me? Maybe Wufei was wrong. Maybe they didn't love me. Maybe I had succeeded after all. Four months was a long time…and they had left me alone for all of it. Not one glimpse of their existence. It was as if they had disappeared from my world and I had secretly relished that thought. Maybe it wasn't so far from the truth. Even now they did not approach the stairs, came nowhere near my lair. Perhaps they feared me after all…

I stared at the ceiling. It was familiar, yet not. I had become accustomed to staring at the plain white plaster of the hospital. This cracked yellow mess I had spent endless hours contemplating was an old memory. It took time to learn it once more.

I lay there for hours, letting the morphine lull me into a trance like state, waiting for it to wear down, for nerves to reawaken. It took so long. The voices faded and receded into nothing, day giving way to night, the birds falling into sleep as the haunting sounds of the dark whispered their way through my window. And all the while I lay there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for a dark more intense than night. A darkness that would never come.

The doctors had broken me. No, I lie to myself. A word had broken me. More than ever before I wanted it over. A stabbing tingle was running through my limbs. It had crept up so slowly I had failed to notice. Perhaps it was only my will that now awakened it. Whatever, it was there. I gathered all my strength and rolled.

I was stronger than I had at first assumed. I rolled straight off the bed, hitting the floor with a loud thunk. I heard the snuffled sounds of waking bodies far below, but they had no way of knowing it was me. I waited until the sounds of their slight waking faded once more into the sound of a sleeping house and then I moved.

It was hard, tiring. I had not used my muscles in four months and I was a wasted version of myself, almost useless. It took fifteen long minutes for me to reach the dresser, and fifteen more to lift myself to my feet. My reward? The mirror.

If I had not recognised myself before, then now I had never known myself. My hair was limp, almost straight, snaking tendrils greasy as they fell over shoulders, bangs slick against my sweaty face. My skin was too pale, white as the moonlight that came through the window. My lips were pale, almost white. My eyes…My eyes were lifeless, dull and unfamiliar. Who was this stranger? I wanted to know for the first time in my life. Why was this person alive?

And for the first time in my life, I had to admit I didn't know.

Dropping to the floor in a pile of exhausted, useless limbs, I cried. I heard the voices down below, sleepy but awake, and I heard the hurried footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn't care. I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't done the mask. The darkness wouldn't come and I couldn't find the strength to move. I was broken and I couldn't fix myself.

The door opened. The hallway light made the figure a silhouette, but I knew who it was. The others would not come; I had scared them all away. They hated me, just like they should. I hated me…

"Duo?" Now you sound like Heero that day in the hospital Wufei…so similar. Can I scare you away now? Will you leave me now? Will you let me die?

You're too late. I'm already dead…I've been dead since the plague came. They said I was immune, but I'm not. I am so infected I bring death everywhere. You're going to die Wufei, do you know that? Unless you leave right now, you're going to die.

Wufei lifted me from the floor and put me back on the bed. I didn't stop crying, my body shaking. I couldn't control it. Wufei was hugging me, whispering words in chinese. I didn't know what they meant, but the tone lulled me into a stupor once more. I could not sleep.

Time passed. I realised I was staring at the ceiling. I waited, but this time I didn't even expect it so I was not disappointed when the darkness did not come. Someone had lit the wick of life in me again, and now…Now I am a threat to everything I hold dear. Note, dear…I don't love. I will not.

And why not? The world came crashing down on me as I looked from the ceiling to Wufei and all the terrible things I had said to him came crashing home. What had I done? I remembered there were others in this house. Others who couldn't even stand to look at me. What had I done? I looked down at my ghostly hands, remembered how they had looked on Deathscythe's controls as we fell toward earth. What had I done?

The tears came and for once they made me feel clean.

"Enough," I whispered to the darkness.

Wufei looked at me strangely but I turned my face away. He didn't understand. He couldn't. Not after everything I had done. He couldn't understand I had gone too far one too many times. I felt the mask breaking, sliding into the oceanic depths of my subconscious. My second half surfaced; the dead half. I looked at my room with lazy eyes that saw no joy, only pain and I wept. I am not ashamed.

Everyone breaks. I'm broken. It's…enough.