Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ True North ❯ True North, Chapter 8 ( Chapter 8 )

True North

Chapter 8

Entire story archived at mediaminer.org under Miyabi

Pairing: 2x1

Category: AU

Warnings: OC kid

Gundam Wing copyright Bandai, Sunrise, and Sotsu Agency. "Eien no Rhapsody" copyright Midori Saiha/Ringo Zaidan.

Thanks to Diamroyal for beta reading!

"Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now." -Michael Ondaatje, /The English Patient/

"The recently dead are always exhausted. There's so much to absorb, so many things that need to be undone. They have their whole lives in front of them." -Kelly Link, "Lull".

Duo didn't know that Spanish wine could taste so good. He was normally a beer guy when it came to alcohol; he drank Blue Wolf (/the/ top choice for college keg parties) most of the time, and when it was a really good occasion, a bottle of Guinness did the trick.

But this bottle that Relena had sent home with him was really something. It was an AC 256 Rioja Reserva, according to its label. They'd only gotten home about an hour and a half ago from celebrating the new year at Relena's, and this was Duo's third or fourth glass. He wasn't sure. All he knew was that the Rioja Reserva was a damn good wine; not too sweet, but pleasantly spicy and easy to sip, and this was something that /had/ to last as long as possible.

If someone could put fall in a bottle, Duo thought, it'd taste just like this.

"Hey, come on. Sit down." He beckoned to Heero, who was sliding books in and out of the shelf across from the couch, where Duo was currently sitting. When all Duo got was a baleful glance, he grinned and patted the cushion invitingly.

"If you come here, I'll let you try some of this," he tempted, waving the glass, sloshing the wine around so much that the deep red liquid threatened to spill over.

Heero's eyebrows drew together as he frowned disapprovingly. "Go easy on that," he grumbled, turning back to the shelf to pull out a few books. "That's your fourth glass already, and I'm /not/ nursing you through a hangover in the morning."

Duo grinned. "You're just mad because you caught our kid trying to drink."

"Yeah, well, if I hadn't, who knows what would happen? I wasn't planning on spending tonight holding her head over the toilet." Heero went over to the couch, setting what he'd pulled out on the coffee table before sitting down himself. Duo noticed that those weren't books, but photo albums. He remembered taking them out to show Heero after they'd gotten back from the hospital, but there'd also been the same photos on disks or memory sticks, and the albums had been put back onto the shelves the next day.

Duo opened his mouth to ask something starting with the word "why" when Heero said, "It's been a while since I looked at the pictures you gave me, and I don't feel like firing up the laptop."

"You sure you don't want any of this?" Duo held out the glass. "It's really good; never though Relena would be a wine aficionado."

"I'm too young to drink."

Duo blinked for a few seconds. "Oh," he said, "you're right..." He felt old all of a sudden. In November, he'd celebrated his thirty-first birthday, and while that really wasn't so old, realizing that Heero was lagging behind him by thirteen years made him feel ancient.

"God," Duo said, "now that I think about it, it's been ten years since I started drinking. Holy shit." He chuckled, taking another sip before setting the wineglass down. "Here, let me show you."

Duo reached for the top album in the stack and opened it up, flipping until he got about three-quarters of the way through. "Ta-da," he sang, pointing at one of the snapshots on that page.

It was of himself at age twenty-one; he was sitting by himself at a bar, knocking back with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other. He'd turned to the side, giving the viewer a full view of the short ponytail that barely came down to his shoulders.

"I got hammered. Luckily, my birthday was on a weekend, and Relena was able to watch Moira while I dealt with the hangover." He snorted affectionately at Heero's disgusted expression. "Hey, don't look at me like that, it was only once. When you've got to keep up with a five-year-old, there's no way you're getting wasted that much."

He turned the page, which had a snapshot of Moira in front of a snowman she'd just built. She was nearly swallowed up by the huge pink and purple coat and blue snowpants she wore; all that was visible of her was her eyes and a few strands of dark hair poking out from her hood.

Another one of Moira. This time she was with Duo, a grim expression on her face as he hoisted her upwards. That was for two reasons; one, someone had mistaken her for a boy thanks to her short hair, and two, she'd just lost a tooth that day and didn't want to show the resulting gap.

"Y'know, she looks /exactly/ like you in that," Duo said, tapping a corner of the picture with his ring finger. "I saw that look on your face so many times before we got together, like your default setting was `irritated', and the only other option was `pissed off.' I'd say you had something up your ass," here, he smirked at Heero, "but I found out for myself later, didn't I?"

Heero didn't answer, but instead glared at Duo and whacked him upside the head. Duo was unfazed by the gesture. Instead, he cracked his neck a few times before eyeing Heero again.

"I think I like you better with something up your ass, from what I know now," he said.

This time, Heero landed a solid punch on his shoulder.

******

"/Owwww/. Jesus Christ, you've got one hell of a punch. I didn't know your knuckles were that bony," Duo moaned. He was doubled over, clutching his shoulder where he'd been punched.

"Your fault." Heero took the album out from Duo's lap and placed it on the coffee table.

"See, this is what I'm talking about. You're so cranky. I can't remember how many times you've whapped me upside the head. Now you're going to punches. Man," Duo's fingers dug into his shoulder as he tried to massage himself.

Heero snorted. "I couldn't have been that bad, Duo." He saw Duo mock-deliberating what he'd been saying, grasping his chin and tilting his head this way and that.

Finally, Duo straightened, saying, "Nope, you /were/ that bad." He smiled. "Once you gave me that first parting shot about how I'd rape you if I got a chance, I knew it wasn't going to be easy."

"What would /you/ do if your lab assistants kept sexually harassing you?" Heero grumbled. Duo only laughed and pulled him over so that his head was now resting on the other man's chest.

"Point taken. But everything turned out okay. You're here, so am I, and nobody's dying." Duo's voice was muffled, thanks to one of Heero's ears being mashed against bone, muscle and skin, topped off with Duo's T-shirt.

Heero stayed like that, counting Duo's heartbeats. When he got to sixty-two, he looked up at Duo and asked, "Why'd you keep going after me?" He knew his social skills weren't the best-to be honest, they were downright awful. He hadn't minded; it kept people away so he could do his work.

"The disk, I guess...no, it was something more than that. The disk only gave me an idea of how things turned out." Duo paused, and Heero felt him rubbing his back with long, slow strokes as he was thinking.

"You know," he said, "once they found out I was a prodigy, I got put with people a lot older than I was. I wound up in the UL2 when I was, what, eight or nine. And then from on, that was it, I was with adults all the damn time. That is, until I met /you/." He pattered his fingers over Heero's shoulders, starting at the top and then ending underneath the scapulae.

"You were the only one my age. I guess it was the little kid in me jumping up and down because there was /another/ little kid to play with, so to speak." He shifted on the couch, so that now they were both lying down.

"There's something comforting about having someone your own age around," he continued.

Then, murmured so low that Heero almost didn't catch it: "I wish we were the same age now..."

"It doesn't matter to me," Heero replied. Duo's fingers had stopped moving on his back, and his hands lay still on the middle of Heero's spine.

"Yeah, well, /I/ care." Duo craned his head upwards, messy strands of hair framing his eyes. "I /liked/ that we were sixteen and then seventeen together. I wanted to grow up with you." He lay back down again, shifting onto his back and letting Heero scoot into a more comfortable position before talking again.

"So much lost time. I keep wondering what it'd be like if I'd been able to find the cure quicker, like five years back or ten years back, or maybe even when I'd just gotten to AC 246. We wouldn't be exactly the same age, but we'd be closer. Sometimes the gap feels so /wide/." He held his hands apart for Heero to see; the hair on his arms was a reddish-gold in the lamp's warm light.

"Isn't that funny?" Duo laughed, but it wasn't normal; there was a note of regret shot throughout that tugged at the heartstrings. "I want the past more than the future."

Heero shook his head. "I don't think it would have really mattered. That only means we'd be reunited earlier."

"More time to spend together, at least. I...I wanted more memories of /us/." Duo sighed, clenching his hand into a fist when he said, "us." When Heero merely blinked at him, waiting for an elaboration, Duo rolled his eyes.

"I mean, getting drunk together, for example. Going through all the rites of passage, maybe even going on a road trip while Relena watched the kid for a while. I don't know. More time together. More of us doing everyday things, like watching TV or waking up next to each other every morning. Even fights; there's always the chance you can look back on them and laugh later." Duo closed his eyes and sighed again.

Heero stared at the silkscreened photo on the fabric of Duo's T-shirt. He hadn't known Duo felt this way; for a period as long as seven months, Duo had managed to hide it pretty well. Still, Heero thought, this conversation would have happened sometime sooner or later. Fifteen years alone wasn't exactly too pleasant, after all. He couldn't imagine being in Duo's place and going through it.

"So you were lonely," he said, his words a little unsure. He didn't know whether Duo was getting at that, or if it was something more. Duo missing him was a given, hell, the time he'd returned to AC 246 was one of the rare occasions Heero saw tears streaming down his face. He hadn't thought it was that bad at first, because Duo would eventually return, but as the days went by, he felt more and more worse lying there on his hospital bed as he waited.

Then one day, Dr. J and Professor G came in and talked about their work in cryogenics, followed by their offer to put Heero in a coldsleep pod so that his chances of surviving were greater when (and if) Duo came through with the cure. He'd taken it, signed the papers that very day. Until now, he never knew why he'd made that decision.

"I was lonely too," he murmured into Duo's ear. "I thought I could wait for you while I was awake, knowing that you'd come back. I couldn't. I missed you too much. Coldsleep sounded better. I could wait for you while I was asleep, and then I wouldn't have to miss you." Heero slid his arms around Duo's waist, enjoying how the T-shirt moved against his skin.

Duo stared at him, eyes wide, taking in what had been said. His mouth opened and shut, but finally he lay there, at a loss for words. Heero took this as a signal to keep talking.

"But I don't want more memories. I don't need them, not with you." He put a hand over Duo's mouth as he was about to ask something. "I've got enough being here with you right now. What matters to me is that we're together. That's why I didn't care /when/ I got revived, as long as you were there."

"I wondered if I'd ever be able to find you again," Duo said.

Heero smiled. "You never had to look in the first place."

"That's how it is with significant others." Duo started to rub Heero's back again, slipping his hand underneath Heero's pajama top. "You're not supposed to look, you let them come. `Course, that doesn't mean I still didn't have to work my ass off trying to get through those barriers you put up."

Heero didn't reply. Instead, he snorted, nuzzling into the crook that Duo's neck and shoulder made. His scent was more intense there; coffee, soap, shampoo, and now the wine that he'd been drinking. A bittersweet fragrance, but comforting in its presence.

"I didn't mind, though. If you'd just hooked up with me right then and there, I'd think there was a catch. At least I knew up-front that it was going to be hard, and then when you finally came around," here, Duo reached upwards, his fingertips barely brushing the back of Heero's neck, "I could relax. There's something satisfying about hard-won things; you /really/ feel like you deserve them, because of how much you had to do for whatever it was. Of course, it was too bad we had to wait until you woke up to get married."

In AC 196, they'd both been too young to apply for a marriage license. They'd remedied that in August with a quick trip to the city clerk, but other than a small celebration with Moira and Relena, they hadn't commemorated that day. For Heero, it was only making things official long after the fact.

They lay there like that, content, until Duo spoke up. "You sure there aren't /any/ memories you'd have liked to have? Just anything during the time you spent asleep?"

"...I don't know." Heero reached out with a finger and began tracing along Duo's collarbone, idly wondering if he'd be able to see bone if he made the shallowest cut with a scalpel. "I'd have to think about that. With you, you'd be the same person no matter when I was revived, I think."

Duo arched an eyebrow. "Even though you said I'd grown up?"

Heero nodded solemnly. "You know how a tree grows, right? If you look at a cross-section, you'd see a ring for every year the tree had been alive. But the core is still the same. That's what it's like with you. No matter how old you were when we met again, I'd still be able to find the you I saw in AC 196." He reached the end of Duo's shoulder and started heading back. "I know you that well, Duo."

It occurred to Heero that he could have been blind and deaf and still able to know who Duo was with his remaining senses. There was the scent, but it was possible that there were others who smelled just as strongly of coffee, though Duo had a faint spicy scent underneath everything else that was just him.

No, he'd have to say that one of the most intimate ways he knew Duo was through touch. He knew everything from the planes and angles to the curves and bumps on Duo's body. As expected, Duo had gotten leaner, with less give to his flesh, thanks to the loss of baby fat after fifteen years, but it hadn't taken long for Heero to reacquaint himself. Some things were still there, like the bones that still stuck out at his ankles and wrists in little hard knobs and the bumps of his spine at the nape of his neck. There was that scar he'd gotten from falling out of a tree when he was a kid on the inside of his elbow; Heero had tried to brush it off at first, thinking it was dirt. The face had lost its softness; the curves weren't so gentle anymore, and the chin had become firmer, but the features-eyebrows, eyes, lips and nose-were the same.

And the hair, always the hair. Heero couldn't forget how it slipped, slid, and tangled in his fingers like silk, how the ends brushed against his body when they had sex. Even after they'd done it so many times, Heero would always grab a handful as Duo began to enter him to steady himself. The pictures of Duo after he'd sawed off his braid were so painful that Heero didn't bother to look a second time. The sooner the images could be erased, the better; Duo looked so vulnerable and weak with his hair gone.

Much as he loved the hair, it wasn't Heero's favorite part of Duo. He liked the hollow between the Adam's apple and the suprasternal notch-the V-shaped area between the collarbones-that he was tracing over and over in circles, feeling the skin tighten and relax with every breath. The area was slightly longer than someone's little finger, in the shape of an inverted teardrop, tapering to a point at the collarbone.

"This is mine," he said to nobody in particular.

"Sneh?" Duo blearily opened his eyes. He'd been dozing.

"This." Heero circled the hollow again. "I want this place. It's my favorite part of you, so I'm claiming it."

Duo chuckled lazily. "Oh, thanks for asking permission. Nah, kidding. You can claim all of me if you want. But why that place?"

"The hollow at the base of your neck?"

"Yeah," Duo said, "someone called it the `vascular sizood' somewhere in a book that I can't remember. Couldn't have been more far off. Nothing vascular about that area. Anyway, it's a crazy place to pick. Most people say they like someone's hair, chest, legs or hands." He shrugged. "I'm just curious. There's nothing too special about it."

Heero pressed his fingertip in the middle of the hollow. "Take a deep breath," he said. Duo inhaled, and the skin caved in, forming a shallow cup.

"Good. Now let it out." As Duo exhaled, the skin relaxed, and the cup was gone. "See, it moves every time you breathe."

"So does my chest."

"Sure. But the way your chest looks and feels will change. It's already changed, like here," Heero slid a hand over Duo's ribs, where they were now snugly covered with wiry muscle. "/This/," he said, "has and always will be the same. You'll get older, and your body will change more, except for this."

"One thing that still remains from AC 196, huh?" Duo yawned. His hands had stopped roaming over Heero's back a long time ago, and they were currently clasped around his waist. The hollow at Duo's neck kept expanding and contracting with each breath.

That was another reason why Heero liked that place; it was always visible, but not so visible that it was the first thing anyone noticed about Duo. Instead, it was hidden, tucked away under the shadows of his chin, but if one really wanted to look, it was in plain view at the same time.

He liked that; the hollow was intimate, something he'd only really see or touch if he was close to Duo, but also something he didn't have to peel off clothing to get to.

Nestling in that area made him feel at peace, able to rest. Speaking of rest...

"Duo," Heero said, "we should go to bed."

Duo didn't answer. An upward glance indicated that he'd fallen asleep, and now he was snoring softly. Heero considered waking Duo up to go upstairs, but the more he thought about it, he realized that he didn't really want to move upstairs either. Spotting a plaid blanket that Moira had folded under the nearby coffee table the night before, he reached over and pulled it out, spreading it over himself and Duo.

"I am /never/ letting you drink this much again," Heero muttered dryly. He bent over, gently kissing Duo's collarbone before turning off the light.

******

"God, I /cannot/ believe you got away with that."

"I did."

Heero heard Moira whistle for the second time over in the foyer. Her friend Amy had arrived, and they were leaving for a movie and then dinner, so she wouldn't be returning home until late. There were only four days of vacation left before school started again, so they were trying to make the most of it. As soon as Amy had walked in the front door, she'd pulled down the waistband of her pants and proudly revealed a tattoo of butterfly wings on the small of her back, even showing Duo as he passed by.

"My parents took it okay," Amy said. "Mom was saying that at least I didn't put it somewhere people could see all the time."

Moira laughed, and Heero saw her toss her long hair back out of the corner of his eye. "I wouldn't get a tattoo. I'd get a piercing either on my eyebrow or my bellybutton..."

"Not until you're at least eighteen," Duo called out from the kitchen, while Heero simultaneously growled, "/No/."

"I'm joking, I'm joking," Moira protested, giggling, before she turned to Amy. "Let's go. We're gonna be late." The girls linked arms and went out the door, Moira yelling, "Bye!" and waving to Heero before Amy yanked her outside.

It then occurred to Heero, as he watched them saunter down the walkway, that it was a very real possibility that he'd never know Moira as well as Duo did. That would have been one benefit of waking up five or ten years earlier; Moira would have been a child, and he'd have been around to watch her develop and grow.

But he /hadn't/ woken up five or ten years earlier, he'd woken up now, and Moira was nearing adulthood too quickly for him. In five or six more years, she'd have a Ph.D in physics at the rate she was progressing; slow compared to himself and Duo, but still fast nonetheless compared to others in her field. By that time, she probably wouldn't be living here-she'd probably think about moving someplace else on Earth, or maybe one of the colonies.

"Duo?"

He heard Duo's footsteps coming down the hallway. "Yeah?"

"Remember that conversation we had on New Year's?"

"Yeah, what about it?" Duo came up next to him and looked out the window.

"There /are/ some memories that I'd want." They were standing next to each other, watching the snow gather on the ground. As soon as it stopped falling, they'd have to shovel the sidewalks again.

"What?" Duo asked.

"I'd want to see Moira grow up. She's going to be an adult soon, and I think I'll never know her as well as you do."

At that, Duo crossed his arms, nodding knowingly.

"That's true, I guess. Fifteen years is a lot of time. But," Duo said, raising his eyebrows, "didn't you also say that you'd still be able to know someone no matter how old they were?"

Heero snorted. "That was /you/. Moira was a baby when you left, and she wasn't fully formed, and she is now."

"Heero, that girl has a ton of growing up to do." Duo laughed, and reached behind him to tighten the elastic on his ponytail. "Hell, sometimes I feel like I'm not grown up yet. You've got a while to get to know her. Trust me on this; at least you missed out on the crazy stuff. She didn't calm down until she hit twelve." His ponytail swung from side to side before he grabbed it and gave it one last yank.

Heero shook his head. "It's not the same. You got to see her grow up."

He looked down at his hands, not really seeing them or anything else. "She's everything and nothing I expected her to be," he whispered, so softly that he hadn't realized that he said it until Duo shrugged in response.

"Only half of it, really. She's developing at a slower rate than we did; she's getting to go through high school and college and she's only three years ahead. I'd say compared to us, she's a normal teenager, and that means that you haven't missed much."

When Heero made a skeptical grunt, Duo put his hands on his hips. "All right. Look at it this way; she's always going to be my little girl, no matter how old she gets. She could be my age and I'll still think of her as a kid. You, on the other hand, get to know her as a person. You'll be closer to equal ground to her because of that."

Heero didn't say anything. Duo sighed, releasing his arms. "Means that much to you, huh? Don't worry about it. You'll get to see her grow up. She's not going anywhere for a while."

He then turned and headed back to the kitchen while Heero stared out the window, waiting for Moira to return.