[fic] The Phantom, part II
Man, fuck these word count limits!!
Duo's dog makes a show of growling on the other side of the door as he goes to open it.
“I'll put him away.”
“It's okay. I'm good with dogs.” Someone said as much to me once, years ago.
“No one's good with Roscoe.”
As he throws open the door, I get a look at the dog-- a hairy, snaggle-toothed mutt of indeterminate breeding-- and try to see where the 'Roscoe' comes from. It sounds like Duo's idea of what a dog should be named. He growls at me, but I can tell there's no real intent behind it, no snarl to his lip. I put my hand out gently and wait for him to come to me, and sure enough, he approaches and allows me to pet him a little. Maybe he just had to see I wasn't there to cause harm.
Duo takes his shoes off and I follow.
“You want a drink?”
I shake my head, glancing around the apartment a little when he turns. It's more bare than I expected. It looks, strangely, like the kinds of places I've been staying in for the last decade. Spartan, dry. Like no one is really living here. Maybe Duo moves too much to bother putting down roots.
Or maybe he's more like me than I think, and it isn't that he won't, it's that he can't. The thought bothers me. I decided to find Duo because I thought that, surely, if any of us could survive after the war, if anyone could teach me how, it would be Duo.
But standing in his living room, the taste of him still lingering in my mouth, I realize I've been deceiving myself for a very long time. That the reason I searched so desperately to find him, the reason I never threw my hands up in defeat and stopped looking, was not quite that noble.
“I'm going to take a shower,” he says, the words surprisingly clear considering how much he's had to drink, and the look he gives me over his shoulder as he walks away leaves me smoldering in place, still absently petting his dog. I stare at that swinging braid and let the fire weave its way through my nerves. It burns through my consciousness, washing away all the words I still have yet to say, the explanations, the pleas, the rehearsed speeches, and replaces them with electric, potent urgency, driving need pulsing through me.
I wanted to tell him why I disappeared, why I had to make that disappearance permanent, but Jesus Christ, I have no control over how I feel about him right now. I have to do this. I need him.
I find myself at the bathroom door with my hand on the knob, listening to the shower running inside, and it's incredibly easy to open it and step in, to shed my clothes as I watch the blurred form of Duo's body beyond the curtain. I pull it aside and he doesn't even act surprised to see me there. No, he invites me in, he melts to my touch as I reach desperately for him, running my hands along the planes of his body, aching to touch all of it, to feel every part that's different from my memory, every muscle that has been added in the last ten years. He has a strong, athletic build, his skin burning against mine, and I find myself pressing my mouth to it, placing wet kisses along his shoulder, his neck, the curve of his ear. Steam rises up around us, making it hard to see him even inches in front of me, making my contact lenses itch, but I refuse to tear myself away from Duo even long enough to take them out.
There were not many things I could change about my appearance after my “death”, save my clothes and the color of my eyes, and it's possible that the changes were mostly for my own benefit than for any added anonymity they could provide. I had to feel like I had been reborn a different person, that I was starting over. Not a killer, or a soldier, or a spy. Not a weapon. The world did not need that Heero Yuy ever again. People who could bring real, lasting peace, people like Relena, could not be discovered to have associated with someone like the person I was in the war. Alive, even if I had never contacted her again, I was still a known terrorist, responsible for countless deaths, a relic of a past the entire world wanted to forget, an albatross around the neck of the tentative new peace. But death has a way of cleansing one's sins, forgiving them, and if I wasn't going to take that leap off that bridge and rid the world of me for real, I had to at least be convincing about it. And I had to convince myself first.
And maybe it's worked, because I'm not sure the old me could have ever done what I'm doing now, could never have touched Duo like this, could never have recognized the desire to. Maybe it's taken ten years of chasing to crystallize these emotions swirling within me and let them consume me, spur me forward. I might have been too afraid in the past, but time has made me desperate, has only stoked the flames rather than diminish them. I have him against the wall already by the time I realize exactly what I want, what I need him to give me.
Duo is pliant and willing under my touch, he moans softly when I sink fingers into him, the sound making my breath catch. There is time to talk about this later-- what this means, what he has meant to me all this time-- but later, later. Now I just need to be inside him. Maybe a little too soon, I slip my fingers out and press myself against him, make him open for me. He throws his head back against my shoulder and I can't stop myself from bending to taste the skin along his jawline, sweet and wet and burning warm.
I think of that violet sunset that pulled me from the bridge's edge and suddenly I need to see his face, I need to look into his eyes. I turn him around, lift him up against the slick wall of the shower, drink in the sight of those purple eyes, unfocused, staring at me, but also through me, like I’m a thousand miles away and he’s looking into the past.
I try to read the look on his face, but all I can see is misery, and I don’t understand. Did I read him wrong, before? I thought I knew Duo better than that-- that if Duo didn’t want this, he’d have made it known back when I kissed him on the stairs, with a punch to the jaw. But I don’t understand the look in his eyes. The sadness. The emptiness. For a moment, it scares me.
Then, he sinks his fingers into my hair and kisses the breath out of me, biting down on my lip like he’s trying to eat me alive. I can’t think about much of anything after that-- the look on Duo’s face a moment ago, the fact that we’ve broken the silence of ten years and a faked death with a wild, animal fuck in his shower-- it’s all washed away with the intensity of his burning, gin-soaked mouth on mine. I dig my hands into his ass and pump into him with abandon, until the water gets cold, and I shut it off mindlessly, wrap Duo’s legs around my waist, stagger out of the shower with him in my arms.
“Bedroom’s in here,” he breathes against my lips. I push blindly forward until I bump along the bed, where I can throw him down and fuck him as hard as I want. God, Duo...
He’s making me crazy, the way he clutches at me, the way his body feels. I didn’t know it would be like this. Or I have been lying to myself for a long, long time, long enough that I believed it.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that it would be so much harder to find Duo than to kill the child terrorist, Heero Yuy. The first years after the war were hectic, difficult, thousands of lost souls, like me, who couldn’t make sense of the new world and removed themselves from it. I don’t know the unidentified man whose hospital records I modified to look like my own, whose body is lying in a grave on-colony with my name on it. If I did, I would have found his family, if there was one to find, let them know, somehow, that he had ended his struggle himself, on his own terms. As soon as I felt free, the letters from Relena’s office sent to every person who might have ever known me, I went to find Duo, but he was like a strange shadow on the colonies, always just beyond my reach. I would track him down, finally, a grainy CCTV image of a man with a braid stuffed haphazardly down the back of a coat sometimes my only clue, only to find he’d packed up his life and moved on by the time I got there.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. Duo has always been the only one to match me at this game, to slip through life like he’s trying not to get caught by anyone. But I have him now, beneath me, his legs wrapped around my waist too tightly to escape. After all this time. After all these years of searching.
I have him right where I’ve wanted him all along.
I press my mouth to his, desperate to taste him, to try, vainly, to explain without words any bit of how I feel. I rear up over him in the darkness, his eyes so deep in the shadows, not like the violet sunset, but like the depths of the ocean, the vastness of space and years and time we have not even begun to make up for.
He stares at me that way, holding my gaze, and I know he sees through me, the code name I had to discard, the life I had to bury so that this fragile new world could bloom over its grave. That the man here with him now is not here because we were fellow soldiers, or because we were lost once together, comrades in a hell that made sense to none of us-- but because he’s the only thing that has ever made sense to me. He, and this chase, the ten years of it, the longing, are the fabric that has tied me together all this time.
He throws his arms around my neck and I begin to feel the climax building inside me, his breath short and hot in my ear, making the hairs on my arms stand up like static electricity, like the energy between us in this bed has become palpable.
“Heero…” he whispers.
I haven’t heard my name in ten years. I have never heard it sound like that in my life. Like a desperate prayer. Like a sad, solemn oath.
Heero Yuy, the boy soldier, has been gone a long time. And still, somehow, in no time at all, Duo has shaken me to the core, made me reveal the man I became when I lost that soldier in 197. Drew it out with my shaking breath, my trembling heart.
“Heero’s dead.”
I shudder into him, orgasm like a crashing tidal wave, like ten years of yearning thrown into one singular moment of ecstacy. He comes beneath me, holding on to me for dear life. We ride it together, drawn along by its power, greater than either of us can withstand.
When I can think again, I realize the moment has come. That I have to explain myself. Why I’m here. Not just for this-- although it’s obvious now that this is also what I’ve been chasing. For him. All of him. Whatever he’ll let me have.
I go to turn on the light. He blinks at me for a moment, adjusting. I watch his pupils shrink and focus. He stares at me with an intensity that I was not expecting.
Suddenly he’s scrambling to his knees, pinning me to the spot with the look on his face. I find that I’m hoping he says something first, but when he doesn’t, I steel my resolve and speak.
“Duo…”
There is a blinding pain in my jaw, and I only realize after I’ve reeled back that he punched me. Just in time for him to hit me again, hard enough to send me flying back on my ass, right to the floor.
“You asshole!”
I stagger to my feet, one hand out to block any more sucker punches. Jesus Christ, Duo still has a good right hook. What the fuck is happening?
“You piece of shit!”
It seems insane that a minute ago, I had him moaning under me. There is none of that in Duo now, just seething anger, his eyes wild like I’ve never seen them before. I watch his balled fists warily, hoping for this to start making sense.
“Duo…”
“Ten years! Ten fucking years! You let me think that you were dead, you fucking asshole!”
Now I was mad. Whose fault was it for ten years? Did he think I waited to find him? For what, entertainment? I crossed every god forsaken colony in the goddamn galaxy trying to find him, just to get punched out!
“I tried to find you. But you made it pretty fucking difficult yourself, ‘Jake’.”
And Bill. And Malcolm. And about sixty other names I will remember until the day I die, each of them one more time he slipped right past me.
I can see that startles him, but he’s still hot with anger, not really listening.
“Oh yeah? And this is your idea of finding me? Picking me up at a bar with a fake name?”
“You used a pseudonym. I thought you were implying we needed to be discrete.”
I can hear the indignation in my voice. But now I’m thinking about his unfocused look back in the bar, the one I took for recognition… everything that followed, the conversation to shake the other patrons’ interest, the kiss in the stairwell, climbing into the shower with him…
“You’re kidding me,” he says, and the pieces start falling into place.
“I thought you recognized me.”
It’s like I watch the anger drain out of him in real time, but he holds on to a tiny mote of that fire, spitting it out under his breath: “Your eyes are brown, shithead. What was I supposed to think?”
“You…”
If the mood was not so tense, the spark in the air between us like tinder, ready to ignite any moment, I might have laughed at him for being fooled by something so simple. He used to be able to recognize me by the damn code I wrote, after all. I feel him watch me as I move to the night stand and pluck the contacts out of my eyes, tossing them on the dresser.
When I look back at him, he freezes, stares at me like he’s seeing me for the first time.
“Heero…”
He stumbles back, looking like he’s about to fall to the floor, so I rush to him and catch him, pulling us both down gently to the ground, and he wraps himself tightly into me, shaking under my arms.
The weight of what it all means, the implication in his trembling shoulders and that wilted look when he saw me take out the contact lenses, hits me all at once.
I’m an idiot, I think, holding him like he might disappear again if I let go. How could I have forgotten that I made him think I was dead for ten years? I deserved more than a couple of punches for that, alone, more for letting my desire for him get ahead of everything else, for fucking his brains out before spilling my heart.
“I’m sorry it took so long. I always intended to come find you, Duo,” I whisper against the cold wet spread of his hair against his forehead, thinking of all the years I had nothing but the chase to drive me, to get me up in the morning,
What did Duo have, all that time? A letter saying I was dead. It had made sense to me, at first, because I was going to find him, I was going to explain all of it. And then I couldn’t, and the years stretched out between us, between the explanation making sense and the explanation just becoming a sad joke on top of the rest of the pile of tragedies.
“I thought you were dead, Heero…”
“I’m sorry.”
I know. I know. I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry. So sorry, whatever that means now.
“I stood at your fucking grave--”
But I can’t hear this part right now, selfish and cowardly as it is, because I know now that Duo was a casualty of my war on my past life-- a war I had thought I was the only one fighting. Duo had fought it this whole time, too, leaving battlegrounds across the colonies, mourning a ghost that was always one step behind him.
I kiss him desperately, an apology and a plea for understanding and just because my heart is sinking into the floor with him. I kiss him until I can feel the anger release in his shoulders, until he throws his arms around my neck and kisses me back. I taste the misery, the loneliness, the ten long years. I kiss him until I don’t have anything left in me but the determination to make it all up to him, somehow, however many years that takes, my whole life, if he needs it. The next life after that, too.
When I pull away, he stares at me, eyes still a little unfocused from the drink, but grounded, back here with me, not out there on the colony with my gravestone. I pull us to our feet and guide us over to the bed, just to hold him among the tangled sheets and smell his hair and feel the warmth of his skin under my fingers.
A long time later, he says, “why didn’t we do this ten years ago?”
I laugh. Yeah, why didn’t we?
“I swear, I didn’t originally intend to sleep with you tonight.”
“You picked me up in a bar.”
True.
“And kissed me on the stairs.”
Also true. I feel my face heat.
“I… couldn’t control myself. Not after seeing you for the first time in so long.”
“Heero…”
He sounds rather surprised at my confession. Like part of him thought I went to all this trouble just to seduce him.
Then, after a moment, he adds: “You are an asshole.”
“And you’re losing your touch,” I shoot back, gently.
There’s a silence between us. The Duo Maxwell I once knew might try to fill it, just because, but Duo has changed too, in the past ten years, and the man he is now is content to let it linger for a while. I can faintly make out the sound of his strange-looking dog snoring in another room somewhere. It registers to me that maybe I have that dog to thank for keeping Duo around long enough for me to find.
“So, where do we go from here?” he asks eventually, and I can tell from the way the words leave his mouth that he’s forgiven me, that we’re going to figure it out together.
I shift to sit up a little, and he follows suit, watching me intently, those violet eyes piercing, like the whole universe hinges on what I say now. The life and the death of me, in that gaze.
God, Duo, do you know how much I love you?
“Well, I’m dead, and you’re virtually off the grid. We can go wherever we want.”
Wherever you want. As long as you take me with you. As long as you never disappear again. As long as I’m by your side.
“What do you have?”
“A hotel room across town, and a duffel bag.” I smile, because I can tell he’s thinking something similar. He’s making room for me in the rest of his life. “What do you have?”
“A month-to-month lease, and a dog.”
“It’s a start,” I say, already reaching for him again. Already missing his closeness, his body against mine. My phantom, no longer slipping through my fingers, evaporating before I can catch him, but here, wrapping his legs around me, plunging his tongue desperately into my mouth. Duo Maxwell, the chase of my entire lifetime, the greatest challenge I ever faced. The violet sky of ten years of sunsets, promising a tomorrow that maybe, maybe would include him in it.
And that day is finally here. And I don’t know what we’re going to make of it, make of ourselves, two lost phantoms, but I have him, finally, I have all of him, and that is all I will ever need.
END
Duo's dog makes a show of growling on the other side of the door as he goes to open it.
“I'll put him away.”
“It's okay. I'm good with dogs.” Someone said as much to me once, years ago.
“No one's good with Roscoe.”
As he throws open the door, I get a look at the dog-- a hairy, snaggle-toothed mutt of indeterminate breeding-- and try to see where the 'Roscoe' comes from. It sounds like Duo's idea of what a dog should be named. He growls at me, but I can tell there's no real intent behind it, no snarl to his lip. I put my hand out gently and wait for him to come to me, and sure enough, he approaches and allows me to pet him a little. Maybe he just had to see I wasn't there to cause harm.
Duo takes his shoes off and I follow.
“You want a drink?”
I shake my head, glancing around the apartment a little when he turns. It's more bare than I expected. It looks, strangely, like the kinds of places I've been staying in for the last decade. Spartan, dry. Like no one is really living here. Maybe Duo moves too much to bother putting down roots.
Or maybe he's more like me than I think, and it isn't that he won't, it's that he can't. The thought bothers me. I decided to find Duo because I thought that, surely, if any of us could survive after the war, if anyone could teach me how, it would be Duo.
But standing in his living room, the taste of him still lingering in my mouth, I realize I've been deceiving myself for a very long time. That the reason I searched so desperately to find him, the reason I never threw my hands up in defeat and stopped looking, was not quite that noble.
“I'm going to take a shower,” he says, the words surprisingly clear considering how much he's had to drink, and the look he gives me over his shoulder as he walks away leaves me smoldering in place, still absently petting his dog. I stare at that swinging braid and let the fire weave its way through my nerves. It burns through my consciousness, washing away all the words I still have yet to say, the explanations, the pleas, the rehearsed speeches, and replaces them with electric, potent urgency, driving need pulsing through me.
I wanted to tell him why I disappeared, why I had to make that disappearance permanent, but Jesus Christ, I have no control over how I feel about him right now. I have to do this. I need him.
I find myself at the bathroom door with my hand on the knob, listening to the shower running inside, and it's incredibly easy to open it and step in, to shed my clothes as I watch the blurred form of Duo's body beyond the curtain. I pull it aside and he doesn't even act surprised to see me there. No, he invites me in, he melts to my touch as I reach desperately for him, running my hands along the planes of his body, aching to touch all of it, to feel every part that's different from my memory, every muscle that has been added in the last ten years. He has a strong, athletic build, his skin burning against mine, and I find myself pressing my mouth to it, placing wet kisses along his shoulder, his neck, the curve of his ear. Steam rises up around us, making it hard to see him even inches in front of me, making my contact lenses itch, but I refuse to tear myself away from Duo even long enough to take them out.
There were not many things I could change about my appearance after my “death”, save my clothes and the color of my eyes, and it's possible that the changes were mostly for my own benefit than for any added anonymity they could provide. I had to feel like I had been reborn a different person, that I was starting over. Not a killer, or a soldier, or a spy. Not a weapon. The world did not need that Heero Yuy ever again. People who could bring real, lasting peace, people like Relena, could not be discovered to have associated with someone like the person I was in the war. Alive, even if I had never contacted her again, I was still a known terrorist, responsible for countless deaths, a relic of a past the entire world wanted to forget, an albatross around the neck of the tentative new peace. But death has a way of cleansing one's sins, forgiving them, and if I wasn't going to take that leap off that bridge and rid the world of me for real, I had to at least be convincing about it. And I had to convince myself first.
And maybe it's worked, because I'm not sure the old me could have ever done what I'm doing now, could never have touched Duo like this, could never have recognized the desire to. Maybe it's taken ten years of chasing to crystallize these emotions swirling within me and let them consume me, spur me forward. I might have been too afraid in the past, but time has made me desperate, has only stoked the flames rather than diminish them. I have him against the wall already by the time I realize exactly what I want, what I need him to give me.
Duo is pliant and willing under my touch, he moans softly when I sink fingers into him, the sound making my breath catch. There is time to talk about this later-- what this means, what he has meant to me all this time-- but later, later. Now I just need to be inside him. Maybe a little too soon, I slip my fingers out and press myself against him, make him open for me. He throws his head back against my shoulder and I can't stop myself from bending to taste the skin along his jawline, sweet and wet and burning warm.
I think of that violet sunset that pulled me from the bridge's edge and suddenly I need to see his face, I need to look into his eyes. I turn him around, lift him up against the slick wall of the shower, drink in the sight of those purple eyes, unfocused, staring at me, but also through me, like I’m a thousand miles away and he’s looking into the past.
I try to read the look on his face, but all I can see is misery, and I don’t understand. Did I read him wrong, before? I thought I knew Duo better than that-- that if Duo didn’t want this, he’d have made it known back when I kissed him on the stairs, with a punch to the jaw. But I don’t understand the look in his eyes. The sadness. The emptiness. For a moment, it scares me.
Then, he sinks his fingers into my hair and kisses the breath out of me, biting down on my lip like he’s trying to eat me alive. I can’t think about much of anything after that-- the look on Duo’s face a moment ago, the fact that we’ve broken the silence of ten years and a faked death with a wild, animal fuck in his shower-- it’s all washed away with the intensity of his burning, gin-soaked mouth on mine. I dig my hands into his ass and pump into him with abandon, until the water gets cold, and I shut it off mindlessly, wrap Duo’s legs around my waist, stagger out of the shower with him in my arms.
“Bedroom’s in here,” he breathes against my lips. I push blindly forward until I bump along the bed, where I can throw him down and fuck him as hard as I want. God, Duo...
He’s making me crazy, the way he clutches at me, the way his body feels. I didn’t know it would be like this. Or I have been lying to myself for a long, long time, long enough that I believed it.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that it would be so much harder to find Duo than to kill the child terrorist, Heero Yuy. The first years after the war were hectic, difficult, thousands of lost souls, like me, who couldn’t make sense of the new world and removed themselves from it. I don’t know the unidentified man whose hospital records I modified to look like my own, whose body is lying in a grave on-colony with my name on it. If I did, I would have found his family, if there was one to find, let them know, somehow, that he had ended his struggle himself, on his own terms. As soon as I felt free, the letters from Relena’s office sent to every person who might have ever known me, I went to find Duo, but he was like a strange shadow on the colonies, always just beyond my reach. I would track him down, finally, a grainy CCTV image of a man with a braid stuffed haphazardly down the back of a coat sometimes my only clue, only to find he’d packed up his life and moved on by the time I got there.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. Duo has always been the only one to match me at this game, to slip through life like he’s trying not to get caught by anyone. But I have him now, beneath me, his legs wrapped around my waist too tightly to escape. After all this time. After all these years of searching.
I have him right where I’ve wanted him all along.
I press my mouth to his, desperate to taste him, to try, vainly, to explain without words any bit of how I feel. I rear up over him in the darkness, his eyes so deep in the shadows, not like the violet sunset, but like the depths of the ocean, the vastness of space and years and time we have not even begun to make up for.
He stares at me that way, holding my gaze, and I know he sees through me, the code name I had to discard, the life I had to bury so that this fragile new world could bloom over its grave. That the man here with him now is not here because we were fellow soldiers, or because we were lost once together, comrades in a hell that made sense to none of us-- but because he’s the only thing that has ever made sense to me. He, and this chase, the ten years of it, the longing, are the fabric that has tied me together all this time.
He throws his arms around my neck and I begin to feel the climax building inside me, his breath short and hot in my ear, making the hairs on my arms stand up like static electricity, like the energy between us in this bed has become palpable.
“Heero…” he whispers.
I haven’t heard my name in ten years. I have never heard it sound like that in my life. Like a desperate prayer. Like a sad, solemn oath.
Heero Yuy, the boy soldier, has been gone a long time. And still, somehow, in no time at all, Duo has shaken me to the core, made me reveal the man I became when I lost that soldier in 197. Drew it out with my shaking breath, my trembling heart.
“Heero’s dead.”
I shudder into him, orgasm like a crashing tidal wave, like ten years of yearning thrown into one singular moment of ecstacy. He comes beneath me, holding on to me for dear life. We ride it together, drawn along by its power, greater than either of us can withstand.
When I can think again, I realize the moment has come. That I have to explain myself. Why I’m here. Not just for this-- although it’s obvious now that this is also what I’ve been chasing. For him. All of him. Whatever he’ll let me have.
I go to turn on the light. He blinks at me for a moment, adjusting. I watch his pupils shrink and focus. He stares at me with an intensity that I was not expecting.
Suddenly he’s scrambling to his knees, pinning me to the spot with the look on his face. I find that I’m hoping he says something first, but when he doesn’t, I steel my resolve and speak.
“Duo…”
There is a blinding pain in my jaw, and I only realize after I’ve reeled back that he punched me. Just in time for him to hit me again, hard enough to send me flying back on my ass, right to the floor.
“You asshole!”
I stagger to my feet, one hand out to block any more sucker punches. Jesus Christ, Duo still has a good right hook. What the fuck is happening?
“You piece of shit!”
It seems insane that a minute ago, I had him moaning under me. There is none of that in Duo now, just seething anger, his eyes wild like I’ve never seen them before. I watch his balled fists warily, hoping for this to start making sense.
“Duo…”
“Ten years! Ten fucking years! You let me think that you were dead, you fucking asshole!”
Now I was mad. Whose fault was it for ten years? Did he think I waited to find him? For what, entertainment? I crossed every god forsaken colony in the goddamn galaxy trying to find him, just to get punched out!
“I tried to find you. But you made it pretty fucking difficult yourself, ‘Jake’.”
And Bill. And Malcolm. And about sixty other names I will remember until the day I die, each of them one more time he slipped right past me.
I can see that startles him, but he’s still hot with anger, not really listening.
“Oh yeah? And this is your idea of finding me? Picking me up at a bar with a fake name?”
“You used a pseudonym. I thought you were implying we needed to be discrete.”
I can hear the indignation in my voice. But now I’m thinking about his unfocused look back in the bar, the one I took for recognition… everything that followed, the conversation to shake the other patrons’ interest, the kiss in the stairwell, climbing into the shower with him…
“You’re kidding me,” he says, and the pieces start falling into place.
“I thought you recognized me.”
It’s like I watch the anger drain out of him in real time, but he holds on to a tiny mote of that fire, spitting it out under his breath: “Your eyes are brown, shithead. What was I supposed to think?”
“You…”
If the mood was not so tense, the spark in the air between us like tinder, ready to ignite any moment, I might have laughed at him for being fooled by something so simple. He used to be able to recognize me by the damn code I wrote, after all. I feel him watch me as I move to the night stand and pluck the contacts out of my eyes, tossing them on the dresser.
When I look back at him, he freezes, stares at me like he’s seeing me for the first time.
“Heero…”
He stumbles back, looking like he’s about to fall to the floor, so I rush to him and catch him, pulling us both down gently to the ground, and he wraps himself tightly into me, shaking under my arms.
The weight of what it all means, the implication in his trembling shoulders and that wilted look when he saw me take out the contact lenses, hits me all at once.
I’m an idiot, I think, holding him like he might disappear again if I let go. How could I have forgotten that I made him think I was dead for ten years? I deserved more than a couple of punches for that, alone, more for letting my desire for him get ahead of everything else, for fucking his brains out before spilling my heart.
“I’m sorry it took so long. I always intended to come find you, Duo,” I whisper against the cold wet spread of his hair against his forehead, thinking of all the years I had nothing but the chase to drive me, to get me up in the morning,
What did Duo have, all that time? A letter saying I was dead. It had made sense to me, at first, because I was going to find him, I was going to explain all of it. And then I couldn’t, and the years stretched out between us, between the explanation making sense and the explanation just becoming a sad joke on top of the rest of the pile of tragedies.
“I thought you were dead, Heero…”
“I’m sorry.”
I know. I know. I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry. So sorry, whatever that means now.
“I stood at your fucking grave--”
But I can’t hear this part right now, selfish and cowardly as it is, because I know now that Duo was a casualty of my war on my past life-- a war I had thought I was the only one fighting. Duo had fought it this whole time, too, leaving battlegrounds across the colonies, mourning a ghost that was always one step behind him.
I kiss him desperately, an apology and a plea for understanding and just because my heart is sinking into the floor with him. I kiss him until I can feel the anger release in his shoulders, until he throws his arms around my neck and kisses me back. I taste the misery, the loneliness, the ten long years. I kiss him until I don’t have anything left in me but the determination to make it all up to him, somehow, however many years that takes, my whole life, if he needs it. The next life after that, too.
When I pull away, he stares at me, eyes still a little unfocused from the drink, but grounded, back here with me, not out there on the colony with my gravestone. I pull us to our feet and guide us over to the bed, just to hold him among the tangled sheets and smell his hair and feel the warmth of his skin under my fingers.
A long time later, he says, “why didn’t we do this ten years ago?”
I laugh. Yeah, why didn’t we?
“I swear, I didn’t originally intend to sleep with you tonight.”
“You picked me up in a bar.”
True.
“And kissed me on the stairs.”
Also true. I feel my face heat.
“I… couldn’t control myself. Not after seeing you for the first time in so long.”
“Heero…”
He sounds rather surprised at my confession. Like part of him thought I went to all this trouble just to seduce him.
Then, after a moment, he adds: “You are an asshole.”
“And you’re losing your touch,” I shoot back, gently.
There’s a silence between us. The Duo Maxwell I once knew might try to fill it, just because, but Duo has changed too, in the past ten years, and the man he is now is content to let it linger for a while. I can faintly make out the sound of his strange-looking dog snoring in another room somewhere. It registers to me that maybe I have that dog to thank for keeping Duo around long enough for me to find.
“So, where do we go from here?” he asks eventually, and I can tell from the way the words leave his mouth that he’s forgiven me, that we’re going to figure it out together.
I shift to sit up a little, and he follows suit, watching me intently, those violet eyes piercing, like the whole universe hinges on what I say now. The life and the death of me, in that gaze.
God, Duo, do you know how much I love you?
“Well, I’m dead, and you’re virtually off the grid. We can go wherever we want.”
Wherever you want. As long as you take me with you. As long as you never disappear again. As long as I’m by your side.
“What do you have?”
“A hotel room across town, and a duffel bag.” I smile, because I can tell he’s thinking something similar. He’s making room for me in the rest of his life. “What do you have?”
“A month-to-month lease, and a dog.”
“It’s a start,” I say, already reaching for him again. Already missing his closeness, his body against mine. My phantom, no longer slipping through my fingers, evaporating before I can catch him, but here, wrapping his legs around me, plunging his tongue desperately into my mouth. Duo Maxwell, the chase of my entire lifetime, the greatest challenge I ever faced. The violet sky of ten years of sunsets, promising a tomorrow that maybe, maybe would include him in it.
And that day is finally here. And I don’t know what we’re going to make of it, make of ourselves, two lost phantoms, but I have him, finally, I have all of him, and that is all I will ever need.
END