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"Crafts"Written By: ELLE and Miss Murdered Disclaimer: Despite how many fics we both post, neither of us owns Gundam Wing or have come any closer to owning it. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: m/m sex, light angst, sap, bad language Pairings: 1x2x1 and 4xR Summary:Set in the same universe as Forever. Duo leaves Heero to babysit armed with construction paper and markers. Notes: This one is for Daphie for encouraging a notion of Miss M's on Valentine's Day that ELLE saw all too easily. ;-P
"Crafts" Heero There are certain things
you hear over and over again in therapy that are nearly impossible
to actually apply to your daily life. For me, one of those things
is to immerse myself in ordinary moments. When over half your life
consisted of tense, high-risk situations that require an incredible
amount of concentration on multiple data points in order to make quick
decisions that could easily be life or death – well, downtime
and the everyday monotony of simply living seemed somehow more difficult
than battlefield negotiation. It was impossible not to focus on the
extraneous details that most people habitually filter out – sometimes
just walking down the street to the corner store was an exercise in
madness. It was a constant calculation of every single person's threat
level, where said threat might come from, how I was possibly going
to respond without a weapon, shielding, or a team. There were plenty
of times I just didn't feel up to it and stayed locked in the house
for days. To be frank, sometimes downtime was torture. And unfortunately I
had a lot of downtime since re-enrolling in therapy. It was okay.
I understood why Une made the decision to draw me back into tactics
and training, presumably so I could spend more time focusing on myself
without the stress of missions. And while having Duo sent off without
me only added to my stress load, letting go of my intense need of
the constant reassurance of his existence was what I was supposed
to be working on. But I didn't have to like it – and I didn't.
I wished I knew how he dealt with it. There were a lot of things I
envied about him. "Uncle 'Ro?" I blinked and turned
to look over at the little girl next to me, seeming entirely too small
in Duo's over-sized office chair. Her bleach blond pigtails, ruddy
cheeks, fair skin, and incredibly fine linen dress replete with ruffles
and eyelets and little bows betrayed her heritage as one of Quatre
and Relena's offspring. "You are 'posed
to make a picture." I grunted a non-committal
response and looked back at the plain blue piece of construction paper
under my hands. The entire desk was covered in it, as well as safety
scissors, glue, glitter, and markers. I didn't even know these things
existed, really, outside of children's television shows I might've
caught brief glimpses of in shitty hotel rooms with a plethora of
skinemax channels to choose from until Duo came home with a bag of
this stuff. Suffice to say I had never 'made a picture' of anything
– at least not like this. Though once I did have a little notepad
with blue lines Odin had given me where I sketched out interesting
cars I had seen or copied technical diagrams of guns from manuals,
it was inevitably lost and he never got me another one. Then I looked back
over at her collection – filled with flowers, animals, and crude
depictions of ladies in what appeared to be expensive gowns –
and felt perplexed. I had a good feeling that this was one of those
times I was supposed to concentrate on the moment. Surely it was why
Duo had left me here with Anastasia while he attended Quatre and Relena's
security detail for their interview with the E-SUNBC. Maybe. To be
fair I hadn't left the house in several days and I wasn't much feeling
up to it today either and perhaps I was giving him less credit than
he deserved. But this activity ended up being just as frustrating
to me. Duo would've been better suited to something like this. I was
inadequate. "You should make
a picture of uncle Duo." She was back to happily
coloring on her piece of paper and the way she said it was almost
as if she was just making an off-handed suggestion. I frowned. That
would be just like Relena. "Why?" I
couldn't help but ask, seeing as she was the resident expert at this
activity and I was a genuinely confused. Then Anastasia turned
to me and gave me a look that could've come straight from her mother
– and probably had a time or two. Though, it could've been worse
– it could've been a look from her father. "Because you love
him. Duh." I swear she almost
rolled her eyes at me but I didn't really mind. This information was
at least somewhat useful to me. "You draw pictures
of people you love?" I asked, honestly curious, and she turned
back to the picture she was working on, one finger pointing to the
people in the picture. "Yeah – it's
mommy, daddy, and me. I love them." It was a crude representation,
I'll say that, only resembling Quatre, Relena, and herself in the
vaguest of ways, but I understood what she was getting at. They were
all holding hands and had hearts colored in around them. "I see,"
I replied, contemplating the picture, not quite sure what a drawn
picture of Duo and I holding hands with rudimentary representations
of hearts would mean to anyone. But then I had an idea. I was fairly experienced
with drawing technical schematics. Much of my time with Doctor J involved
tracing them over and over again until I developed memorization techniques
based on typical archetypes. I had never found much use for that particular
skill set outside of missions, but it was oddly comforting to use
those skills for something outside of monotonous recall. Therefore my drawing
was obviously far less primitive than hers, but in many ways no less
meaningful. And Anna watched me with half an eye as I worked, offering
color suggestions and where I should put glitter. It was a little
ridiculous given the subject matter, but I acquiesced to her superior
knowledge of this activity, which I wouldn't even be participating
in without her guidance, and indulged her whims. And actually, it was
fairly relaxing, using this skill for such a mundane task. That in
and of itself surprised me – typically I couldn't cope with attempting
to apply skills I considered military to civilian settings, finding
it difficult to let go of ingrained training and taking the activity
too seriously. But Anna's suggestions were preposterous and kept me
focused on how inconsequential the task truly was. If it were up to
me, on my own however, I might've struggled more, becoming mono-focused
on every tiny detail. As it was, pouring silver glitter into the grating
on Deathscythe's chest was hardly a very accurate representation. Although somehow the
addition of it to Duo's hair seemed impossibly more accurate as I
considered the way the light had hit it that day, the last time I
had seen him after the Barton Rebellion before I left on my ill-fated
quest for self-discovery. I'm sure he didn't even see me standing
there in the Preventer hangar bay, hidden in the darkness of the warehouse,
watching him standing atop his Gundam for the last time. We'd hardly
said three words to each other since I was discharged from the hospital
but really – what was there to say? The war was over. We were
no longer comrades – none of us were. Wufei had the right idea,
leaving immediately afterward. Drawing out the inevitable only made
it more difficult. Not that I had had much of a choice but still,
these other boys were the closest thing I'd ever had to friendship,
the war a purpose, and now I had nothing. Duo seemed reluctant
too, hesitant to take that final flight, leaning into the helmet of
Deathscythe as if trying to comfort a friend on death row. Trowa and
Quatre had already left for the detonation site, I had seen them blaze
across the horizon as I stepped into the bay, but Duo was just like
me – he had nothing to go back to once this was over and he just
needed another minute. "Well, you'll
have to practice," Anastasia told me with a heavy sigh as she
studied my work with critical blue eyes, much like her father's. "I guess you'll
just have to come back," I offered and though I'm sure Duo could've
made it sound better – less cold, more genuine – she still
smiled at me. "And maybe uncle
Duo can help." I was nodding my head
in agreement when I heard the door downstairs open and Duo's warm
voice filter down the hall to the office, in deep conversation with
our friends. Suddenly, I was embarrassed of my picture and slid it
under the other construction paper as Anna gathered up her own drawings
and hopped off the chair, holding out her hand for mine to go and
meet her parents. ~ * ~ |
