[gw fic] Still Crazy
Still Crazy
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Rating: PG
Ship: Wufei/Sally
Summary: "I met my old lover on the street last night / she seemed so glad to see me / I just smiled"
A/N: This was originally a songfic (shock! horror!) but I've removed the lyrics, so have no fear. It won "Best Het" for some contest, which I think suzume_sparrow hosted. The really cool thing was, ponderosa121, whom I adore, did artwork for all the winners. Score! The pic she did for this follows the story, and is totally work-safe. The story is about 3,000 words.
I was coming out of the Met, after a matinee of "Carmen." (I never used to be a fan of the opera, or any of the other performing arts. Two girlfriends ago I was somehow talked into getting a subscription, which I'm actually considering renewing, when it runs out. It's a lot easier to talk me into things than it used to be.) It was a pleasant June evening, the kind that make you feel light as a soap bubble. There were a few thin clouds, a couple of stars, the light spray from the fountain, a good Latin beat from the salsa band playing for the dancers in the plaza, a flourish of turquoise silk and dark gold curls...and there was Sally.
She was dancing in a crowd of about sixty people, and I swear, if her hair had been up in the braids I always remembered I would have thought I was imagining things and walked away. But her hair was down, and there she was, standing out from the crowd the way she always did. I don't think I moved. No, I must have, because I saw her just as I was leaving the opera house, and by the time she saw me I was standing by the fountain. She stopped dancing, looked is me, and frowned slightly. If she hadn't recognized me, if she had said something like "Don't I know you from somewhere...?" I would have walked away. But she didn't. She said clearly, over the music, the dancing, and the falling water, "Chang Wufei," just as though she had been waiting for me the whole time. Do they even have moments like that in other cities?
*
She told me she was staying with a friend in the East Village for a few days. She introduced me to the friend--Martha or Marty or something. They were just having fun, she said, enjoying the good weather and the good music, hitting on random guys. I guess she asked what I was doing there, how I was, where I was staying. Pretty mundane stuff. Still, she was Sally, and Sally could always make even the most mundane conversations pretty exciting.
She said she knew I was living in New York because she had read some of my articles and in a few of them I talked about teaching at Columbia.
"I wasn't sure if I should try to look you up, though," she said. She didn't look awkward at all, which was how I felt. "I guess I couldn't believe you could ever live here. So many people."
"It's been ten years," I reminded her. "That's a long time. I'm different."
"Obviously," she replied, fixing me with those blue, blue eyes of hers. "You're better."
I couldn't tell if she was flirting with me, then. Part of me kind of hoped she was. She looked so good--and I was feeling pretty good. But with Sally it's impossible to tell. She always says what she thinks with complete honestly. It used to piss me off. Now I appreciate it.
The friend--Martha/Marty--obviously thought we were flirting because she said, grinning indulgently, "Care to join us?"
Sally laughed, tossing her head back. The gold curls splashed her tanned, toned shoulders. I bet she still swims, I thought. "Wufei DOESN'T dance."
That was unjust of her, but instead of saying so, I grabbed Martha/Marty by the hands, pulled her close for a second, then spun her.
*
I looked over my shoulder at Sally. She was grinning at me. "What?" This was a few minutes later, when we were taking the one downtown. Martha/Marty had packed us off pretty quickly.
"I was just wondering. I didn't teach you how to dance, did I?"
"No." I added silently, You only taught me to want to learn.
"Maturity looks good on you, Wufei," she said.
"Maturity?" I dismissed the idea with a derisive snort. "I'm not that much older than my students."
"I bet they're aware of it."
Shrug.
You're probably thinking, He's still crazy about her. I'd probably hit you if you said it to my face, but you'd be right. One thing I had learned in the ten years since we broke up (if that's even the right term, since we were never officially together) is that you carry your first love with you forever. When I first moved to the city I kept going after dainty, dark-haired, dark-eyed women--the physical antithesis of Sally. I kept falling for athletic blondes. But very few of them meant much to me. None of them lasted for very long. One of them actually told me I was too demanding, and that my standards were too high. I guess there was some truth to that, but really, I was always unconsciously comparing them to Sally.
I didn't really think I'd bump into the original again. Now that I had, I didn't know what to do. She was acting as though there had never been any bitterness between us, almost as though there wasn't ten years between tonight and the last time we had seen each other. I wanted to ask her what she had been doing all these years, but I was sort of afraid to. Afraid may be the wrong word. It WAS a little bit of cowardice, but I honestly didn't know whether or not I had the RIGHT to ask. She wasn't married--I admit it, I checked for a wedding band--and because of her comment about hitting on random guys I gathered she wasn't seeing anyone. Still, I didn't want to know about any relationships she might have had after me. I knew I would be jealous and I didn't want that to spoil the evening.
"Some things haven't changed," Sally observed, when we got off the subway and began to walk east toward Mott Street where there's a restaurant to which I bring people who care that there's a difference between authentic and American Chinese food, and who don't care too much about ambience. "You're as talkative as ever."
"My students wouldn't believe you if you told them that."
She laughed. God, I thought, she still has the best laugh I've ever heard. Then I thought, Forget it, Chang. Just because you're thirty years old and have finally achieved the level of maturity necessary to pursue a meaningful, long-lasting relationship doesn't mean it'll be with her. That can't be why you're meeting her again NOW. That would be too obvious, too easy. Almost as though it were meant to be.
But as we walked and joked about what idealistic idiots we'd been way back when (yes, I can do that now) I thought, But it might be nice to give us another try.
*
"So where have you BEEN for the past ten years?" I asked. I was halfway into my second beer at the time and feeling a little less anxious about the answer I'd receive.
Sally looked up from the shrimp dangling between her chopsticks. "China mostly. Well, first I went back to finish my degree. I left the Preventers about six months after you did. The political situation was stable enough and medicine has always been my real love. So I became a doctor and went back to my home country." She sliced the softened shell off the shrimp and bit into it.
I felt oddly relieved. Not that it would have mattered if she'd told me she'd left a string of broken hearts from here to the Colonies. Well, it shouldn't have mattered. I said, "I bet you're a good doctor. I'm sorry, that sounds a little condescending. I mean it, though. You were good at everything I saw you do. It was a little exasperating. But I knew medicine was your calling."
She looked at me oddly for a moment. Then she said, "You know, that's the first time you ever complimented me about something that was important to me."
"That can't be true." I couldn't believe it. I'd always admired her, even before I fell for her. She had to have known that. She always read me like a book, even when I was a fifteen-year-old prick. Probably especially then. "Well, fine. I'm saying it now. I knew medicine was your calling and I knew that if you ever went back and finished med school you'd be a great doctor. I'm sorry I never told you."
"Why?" she asked, dipping again into the hotpot with her chopsticks. "I know I'm a good doctor. A damn good one. I don't need anyone to tell me that." She found a piece of taro and let it drip over her plate. "I'm proud of what I do. Colonel Bunto did so much damage to my homeland. They need people like me there. About three years ago me and two other recent grads spent the summer in this tiny mountain village that had virtually no medical facilities except for what we brought with us. We spent about three quarters of the time treating people in our own house, and the rest of it on the phone with government reps, screaming at them to give us more funding." She sighed. "Fifteen years. Sometimes I feel as though the war still isn't over."
History is an endless waltz... In my head I can still hear Marie Maia Barton Khushrenada telling that to me sometimes. I hear it when I take the bus through certain parts of the city and see the neglect and deterioration and the evidence of violence. It's part of the reason I'm so hard on my students, why I want to drill everything I know into their heads. I said, half to Sally, half to myself, "My students sometimes ask me what I did during the war."
"What do you tell them?"
I shrug and sip my beer. "The truth. I tell them I was fifteen during the war. What the hell did they think I did?"
She looked up at me, her expression warmer. "Do you like being a teacher, Wufei?"
"I do," I said, without hesitation. "I'm proud of what I do. I was a scholar before I was anything else, you know. It's my calling."
"It must be. Your papers are brilliant, anyway. Columbia must have snapped you up the minute you graduated." Her smile deepening, she said, "Have you ever dated any of your students?"
What! "Woman!" I couldn't help it; the word just popped out.
She laughed. "Man. I bet you have. Why not? You're hot, you're brilliant, you're only thirty."
"Thanks for reminding me."
"Hey, I'm thirty-four. You have that look on your face..."
"What look?"
"Your You're-right-but-I'll-be-damned-if-I-admit-it look. I missed it. I can always tell what you're thinking."
"Always?" I asked skeptically.
"Almost always," she amended.
I was stupid to think I could get over you, I thought as I watched her eat her taro. God, I was stupid when I was younger. When she looked up she gave me her own trademark expression--that knowing smile--but she didn't say anything.
*
What am I doing with my life? Here I am back in my apartment and it's four in the morning, and I'm still awake even though I'm exhausted.
I can't stop thinking about her.
I can't believe I never told her how much I admired everything she did. No, no, I can believe it. I was such a miserable little brat back when we were Preventers together. What I can't believe is that she didn't realize how I felt about her. I admired no women--no person, really--as I admired her. It should have been obvious.
Should I have said something anyway?
I'm trying to remember how it was when we were together--if you can even call it that. Actually, I can count the times we spent together NOT discussing politics or tactics with the fingers of one hand. But they were nice, so nice. So comfortable. They stand out in my mind more clearly than the lecture I gave yesterday.
We're in a driveway and dandelions are poking through the cracks in the cement. We're fixing her car because god dammit, that thing is her baby and no one touches it except her. It's about a hundred degrees, we're filthy, covered in sweat and oil and she's in these faded overalls and her hair's a mess, and God, she's sexy. She knows exactly what to do, but she's not showing off. She really needs my help with a few things. Classic Sally. I feel like the king of the world for knowing what a sparkplug looks like. I'm falling for her, and I'm just watching myself fall, with an idiotic grin on my face.
We're drinking coffee at a café. It's NOT a date; she has something she has to tell me, she says. I've already told her about Meilan, my fourteen-year-old wife who called herself Nataku, thought she knew what justice was, and died defending a goddamn field of flowers. She's the first person I've told. What Sally tells me shocks me; she was there when OZ and the Alliance attacked Colony A0206, OZ with mobile suits, and Alliance with biological weapons. She was there, she says, and she was powerless to prevent the attack. She lied in her report to her superior officer, claiming the attack was a success when it wasn't, but she wishes she could have done more. I don't know why she tells me this. She's not seeking absolution; I can read it in her face, it's one of those rare times she's readable. I don't know what to tell her, though. I don't think she wants comfort. I'm comforted though, oddly enough, to know that she was there when I lost Meilan. But I can't tell her this.
We're dancing together at the Christmas party at the Preventers Headquarters. I don't know how to dance yet, so she's pretty much leading--which has inspired some obnoxious comments from Duo Maxwell. I won't let her go, though. It's a nice song we're dancing to. I don't know it, but it gets to me. Or maybe that's not it, I realize. Maybe it's not the music that makes me want to hold her and bury my face in her soft, clean hair, and think of clever things to say. Maybe it's not the fact that every other guy in the room is paired with someone and enjoying himself. Maybe it's her.
We were too close then, and I had to run. I don't know why. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons. I was afraid to care for someone again and risk losing her. I still hadn't come to terms with what I'd done in the war and didn't want to move on with my life until I had. I was a coward. I was weak, and I thought I was being strong.
So I ran, practically the next day. I told Lady Une that I quit, packed my bags, and went as far away as I could, to New York, where I hoped to lose myself. And I did for a while. I enrolled as a student, buried myself in my studies, had as little to do with my past as I could. I lost contact with the other pilots, with Sally.
I found myself again slowly. I WAS a scholar before the war, and it was comforting to be one again. I channeled most of my energy into learning everything I could about post-colonial philosophy. I was good at it, and somehow I wound up teaching it.
And yet...
Damn.
I told Sally that teaching was my calling. And I guess it is.
But I still wonder what would have happened if I had stayed with the Preventers. With her. It might have been even better.
*
It's after four. I'm never getting to sleep, now. I make myself a cup of coffee ("death before decaf" was one of Sally's mottoes, I remember) and go to sit on the fire escape. It's not so bad out. Not too hot. It's kind of nice, actually. I'm looking down on Columbus and it's actually somewhat quiet. There's an occasional taxi and the clatter of tin garbage cans that's probably a cat.
It's ten years since I ran off. If she ever felt anything stronger than friendship for me I'm sure she's gotten over it. I haven't, but we've already established I'm sort of a head case. An improved one, though.
She's here, in this city. Ten million people, and one of them is Sally and one of them is me. At four-thirty in the morning that has cosmic significance.
She's happy with her life, I think. I'm content with mine. That's all right, isn't it? Anyway, I'm only thirty. I have years and years left to get over Sally.
But I'd rather spend those years with her. Hell, I might have spent the past ten years with her.
This is stupid. This is pointless.
But she's HERE. And I'M here.
And I love her. And part of me knows that I always will, because she'll always be Sally and I'll always be Wufei.
It occurs to me that that might be part of the problem.
After Meilan died I went off to fight for a justice that I'd once told her didn't exist. I didn't find it on the battlefield. I haven't really found it in academia. This morning, though, I think I've finally found a way of determining justice, at least for myself.
I'm going to call Sally. Right now. It's crazy, it's stupid, I'm going to do it. She said when I walked her home earlier that I could call her any time, for anything. I'm going to hold her to that. I'm going to call her and if she knows who I am without me telling her--the way she knew me when I saw her dancing by the fountain at Lincoln Center--I'll make a date with her. An official date. And I'll tell her everything. Even if she turns me down, at least she'll know, and I'll know.
I pick up the phone. My hand is shaking.
This is crazy. I'm crazy.
Outside, the sky is lightening. I can hear birds. I'm running out of time.
I dial the number she gave me. Come on, Sally, I mutter into the mouthpiece as it rings on the other end. Come on, amazing woman. Pick up. Know me.
There's a click. Someone picked up! "Whah fuh?" a female voice mumbles.
It's her. And that's close enough.
02/23/02
by ponderosa121
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Rating: PG
Ship: Wufei/Sally
Summary: "I met my old lover on the street last night / she seemed so glad to see me / I just smiled"
A/N: This was originally a songfic (shock! horror!) but I've removed the lyrics, so have no fear. It won "Best Het" for some contest, which I think suzume_sparrow hosted. The really cool thing was, ponderosa121, whom I adore, did artwork for all the winners. Score! The pic she did for this follows the story, and is totally work-safe. The story is about 3,000 words.
I was coming out of the Met, after a matinee of "Carmen." (I never used to be a fan of the opera, or any of the other performing arts. Two girlfriends ago I was somehow talked into getting a subscription, which I'm actually considering renewing, when it runs out. It's a lot easier to talk me into things than it used to be.) It was a pleasant June evening, the kind that make you feel light as a soap bubble. There were a few thin clouds, a couple of stars, the light spray from the fountain, a good Latin beat from the salsa band playing for the dancers in the plaza, a flourish of turquoise silk and dark gold curls...and there was Sally.
She was dancing in a crowd of about sixty people, and I swear, if her hair had been up in the braids I always remembered I would have thought I was imagining things and walked away. But her hair was down, and there she was, standing out from the crowd the way she always did. I don't think I moved. No, I must have, because I saw her just as I was leaving the opera house, and by the time she saw me I was standing by the fountain. She stopped dancing, looked is me, and frowned slightly. If she hadn't recognized me, if she had said something like "Don't I know you from somewhere...?" I would have walked away. But she didn't. She said clearly, over the music, the dancing, and the falling water, "Chang Wufei," just as though she had been waiting for me the whole time. Do they even have moments like that in other cities?
*
She told me she was staying with a friend in the East Village for a few days. She introduced me to the friend--Martha or Marty or something. They were just having fun, she said, enjoying the good weather and the good music, hitting on random guys. I guess she asked what I was doing there, how I was, where I was staying. Pretty mundane stuff. Still, she was Sally, and Sally could always make even the most mundane conversations pretty exciting.
She said she knew I was living in New York because she had read some of my articles and in a few of them I talked about teaching at Columbia.
"I wasn't sure if I should try to look you up, though," she said. She didn't look awkward at all, which was how I felt. "I guess I couldn't believe you could ever live here. So many people."
"It's been ten years," I reminded her. "That's a long time. I'm different."
"Obviously," she replied, fixing me with those blue, blue eyes of hers. "You're better."
I couldn't tell if she was flirting with me, then. Part of me kind of hoped she was. She looked so good--and I was feeling pretty good. But with Sally it's impossible to tell. She always says what she thinks with complete honestly. It used to piss me off. Now I appreciate it.
The friend--Martha/Marty--obviously thought we were flirting because she said, grinning indulgently, "Care to join us?"
Sally laughed, tossing her head back. The gold curls splashed her tanned, toned shoulders. I bet she still swims, I thought. "Wufei DOESN'T dance."
That was unjust of her, but instead of saying so, I grabbed Martha/Marty by the hands, pulled her close for a second, then spun her.
*
I looked over my shoulder at Sally. She was grinning at me. "What?" This was a few minutes later, when we were taking the one downtown. Martha/Marty had packed us off pretty quickly.
"I was just wondering. I didn't teach you how to dance, did I?"
"No." I added silently, You only taught me to want to learn.
"Maturity looks good on you, Wufei," she said.
"Maturity?" I dismissed the idea with a derisive snort. "I'm not that much older than my students."
"I bet they're aware of it."
Shrug.
You're probably thinking, He's still crazy about her. I'd probably hit you if you said it to my face, but you'd be right. One thing I had learned in the ten years since we broke up (if that's even the right term, since we were never officially together) is that you carry your first love with you forever. When I first moved to the city I kept going after dainty, dark-haired, dark-eyed women--the physical antithesis of Sally. I kept falling for athletic blondes. But very few of them meant much to me. None of them lasted for very long. One of them actually told me I was too demanding, and that my standards were too high. I guess there was some truth to that, but really, I was always unconsciously comparing them to Sally.
I didn't really think I'd bump into the original again. Now that I had, I didn't know what to do. She was acting as though there had never been any bitterness between us, almost as though there wasn't ten years between tonight and the last time we had seen each other. I wanted to ask her what she had been doing all these years, but I was sort of afraid to. Afraid may be the wrong word. It WAS a little bit of cowardice, but I honestly didn't know whether or not I had the RIGHT to ask. She wasn't married--I admit it, I checked for a wedding band--and because of her comment about hitting on random guys I gathered she wasn't seeing anyone. Still, I didn't want to know about any relationships she might have had after me. I knew I would be jealous and I didn't want that to spoil the evening.
"Some things haven't changed," Sally observed, when we got off the subway and began to walk east toward Mott Street where there's a restaurant to which I bring people who care that there's a difference between authentic and American Chinese food, and who don't care too much about ambience. "You're as talkative as ever."
"My students wouldn't believe you if you told them that."
She laughed. God, I thought, she still has the best laugh I've ever heard. Then I thought, Forget it, Chang. Just because you're thirty years old and have finally achieved the level of maturity necessary to pursue a meaningful, long-lasting relationship doesn't mean it'll be with her. That can't be why you're meeting her again NOW. That would be too obvious, too easy. Almost as though it were meant to be.
But as we walked and joked about what idealistic idiots we'd been way back when (yes, I can do that now) I thought, But it might be nice to give us another try.
*
"So where have you BEEN for the past ten years?" I asked. I was halfway into my second beer at the time and feeling a little less anxious about the answer I'd receive.
Sally looked up from the shrimp dangling between her chopsticks. "China mostly. Well, first I went back to finish my degree. I left the Preventers about six months after you did. The political situation was stable enough and medicine has always been my real love. So I became a doctor and went back to my home country." She sliced the softened shell off the shrimp and bit into it.
I felt oddly relieved. Not that it would have mattered if she'd told me she'd left a string of broken hearts from here to the Colonies. Well, it shouldn't have mattered. I said, "I bet you're a good doctor. I'm sorry, that sounds a little condescending. I mean it, though. You were good at everything I saw you do. It was a little exasperating. But I knew medicine was your calling."
She looked at me oddly for a moment. Then she said, "You know, that's the first time you ever complimented me about something that was important to me."
"That can't be true." I couldn't believe it. I'd always admired her, even before I fell for her. She had to have known that. She always read me like a book, even when I was a fifteen-year-old prick. Probably especially then. "Well, fine. I'm saying it now. I knew medicine was your calling and I knew that if you ever went back and finished med school you'd be a great doctor. I'm sorry I never told you."
"Why?" she asked, dipping again into the hotpot with her chopsticks. "I know I'm a good doctor. A damn good one. I don't need anyone to tell me that." She found a piece of taro and let it drip over her plate. "I'm proud of what I do. Colonel Bunto did so much damage to my homeland. They need people like me there. About three years ago me and two other recent grads spent the summer in this tiny mountain village that had virtually no medical facilities except for what we brought with us. We spent about three quarters of the time treating people in our own house, and the rest of it on the phone with government reps, screaming at them to give us more funding." She sighed. "Fifteen years. Sometimes I feel as though the war still isn't over."
History is an endless waltz... In my head I can still hear Marie Maia Barton Khushrenada telling that to me sometimes. I hear it when I take the bus through certain parts of the city and see the neglect and deterioration and the evidence of violence. It's part of the reason I'm so hard on my students, why I want to drill everything I know into their heads. I said, half to Sally, half to myself, "My students sometimes ask me what I did during the war."
"What do you tell them?"
I shrug and sip my beer. "The truth. I tell them I was fifteen during the war. What the hell did they think I did?"
She looked up at me, her expression warmer. "Do you like being a teacher, Wufei?"
"I do," I said, without hesitation. "I'm proud of what I do. I was a scholar before I was anything else, you know. It's my calling."
"It must be. Your papers are brilliant, anyway. Columbia must have snapped you up the minute you graduated." Her smile deepening, she said, "Have you ever dated any of your students?"
What! "Woman!" I couldn't help it; the word just popped out.
She laughed. "Man. I bet you have. Why not? You're hot, you're brilliant, you're only thirty."
"Thanks for reminding me."
"Hey, I'm thirty-four. You have that look on your face..."
"What look?"
"Your You're-right-but-I'll-be-damned-if-I-admit-it look. I missed it. I can always tell what you're thinking."
"Always?" I asked skeptically.
"Almost always," she amended.
I was stupid to think I could get over you, I thought as I watched her eat her taro. God, I was stupid when I was younger. When she looked up she gave me her own trademark expression--that knowing smile--but she didn't say anything.
*
What am I doing with my life? Here I am back in my apartment and it's four in the morning, and I'm still awake even though I'm exhausted.
I can't stop thinking about her.
I can't believe I never told her how much I admired everything she did. No, no, I can believe it. I was such a miserable little brat back when we were Preventers together. What I can't believe is that she didn't realize how I felt about her. I admired no women--no person, really--as I admired her. It should have been obvious.
Should I have said something anyway?
I'm trying to remember how it was when we were together--if you can even call it that. Actually, I can count the times we spent together NOT discussing politics or tactics with the fingers of one hand. But they were nice, so nice. So comfortable. They stand out in my mind more clearly than the lecture I gave yesterday.
We're in a driveway and dandelions are poking through the cracks in the cement. We're fixing her car because god dammit, that thing is her baby and no one touches it except her. It's about a hundred degrees, we're filthy, covered in sweat and oil and she's in these faded overalls and her hair's a mess, and God, she's sexy. She knows exactly what to do, but she's not showing off. She really needs my help with a few things. Classic Sally. I feel like the king of the world for knowing what a sparkplug looks like. I'm falling for her, and I'm just watching myself fall, with an idiotic grin on my face.
We're drinking coffee at a café. It's NOT a date; she has something she has to tell me, she says. I've already told her about Meilan, my fourteen-year-old wife who called herself Nataku, thought she knew what justice was, and died defending a goddamn field of flowers. She's the first person I've told. What Sally tells me shocks me; she was there when OZ and the Alliance attacked Colony A0206, OZ with mobile suits, and Alliance with biological weapons. She was there, she says, and she was powerless to prevent the attack. She lied in her report to her superior officer, claiming the attack was a success when it wasn't, but she wishes she could have done more. I don't know why she tells me this. She's not seeking absolution; I can read it in her face, it's one of those rare times she's readable. I don't know what to tell her, though. I don't think she wants comfort. I'm comforted though, oddly enough, to know that she was there when I lost Meilan. But I can't tell her this.
We're dancing together at the Christmas party at the Preventers Headquarters. I don't know how to dance yet, so she's pretty much leading--which has inspired some obnoxious comments from Duo Maxwell. I won't let her go, though. It's a nice song we're dancing to. I don't know it, but it gets to me. Or maybe that's not it, I realize. Maybe it's not the music that makes me want to hold her and bury my face in her soft, clean hair, and think of clever things to say. Maybe it's not the fact that every other guy in the room is paired with someone and enjoying himself. Maybe it's her.
We were too close then, and I had to run. I don't know why. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons. I was afraid to care for someone again and risk losing her. I still hadn't come to terms with what I'd done in the war and didn't want to move on with my life until I had. I was a coward. I was weak, and I thought I was being strong.
So I ran, practically the next day. I told Lady Une that I quit, packed my bags, and went as far away as I could, to New York, where I hoped to lose myself. And I did for a while. I enrolled as a student, buried myself in my studies, had as little to do with my past as I could. I lost contact with the other pilots, with Sally.
I found myself again slowly. I WAS a scholar before the war, and it was comforting to be one again. I channeled most of my energy into learning everything I could about post-colonial philosophy. I was good at it, and somehow I wound up teaching it.
And yet...
Damn.
I told Sally that teaching was my calling. And I guess it is.
But I still wonder what would have happened if I had stayed with the Preventers. With her. It might have been even better.
*
It's after four. I'm never getting to sleep, now. I make myself a cup of coffee ("death before decaf" was one of Sally's mottoes, I remember) and go to sit on the fire escape. It's not so bad out. Not too hot. It's kind of nice, actually. I'm looking down on Columbus and it's actually somewhat quiet. There's an occasional taxi and the clatter of tin garbage cans that's probably a cat.
It's ten years since I ran off. If she ever felt anything stronger than friendship for me I'm sure she's gotten over it. I haven't, but we've already established I'm sort of a head case. An improved one, though.
She's here, in this city. Ten million people, and one of them is Sally and one of them is me. At four-thirty in the morning that has cosmic significance.
She's happy with her life, I think. I'm content with mine. That's all right, isn't it? Anyway, I'm only thirty. I have years and years left to get over Sally.
But I'd rather spend those years with her. Hell, I might have spent the past ten years with her.
This is stupid. This is pointless.
But she's HERE. And I'M here.
And I love her. And part of me knows that I always will, because she'll always be Sally and I'll always be Wufei.
It occurs to me that that might be part of the problem.
After Meilan died I went off to fight for a justice that I'd once told her didn't exist. I didn't find it on the battlefield. I haven't really found it in academia. This morning, though, I think I've finally found a way of determining justice, at least for myself.
I'm going to call Sally. Right now. It's crazy, it's stupid, I'm going to do it. She said when I walked her home earlier that I could call her any time, for anything. I'm going to hold her to that. I'm going to call her and if she knows who I am without me telling her--the way she knew me when I saw her dancing by the fountain at Lincoln Center--I'll make a date with her. An official date. And I'll tell her everything. Even if she turns me down, at least she'll know, and I'll know.
I pick up the phone. My hand is shaking.
This is crazy. I'm crazy.
Outside, the sky is lightening. I can hear birds. I'm running out of time.
I dial the number she gave me. Come on, Sally, I mutter into the mouthpiece as it rings on the other end. Come on, amazing woman. Pick up. Know me.
There's a click. Someone picked up! "Whah fuh?" a female voice mumbles.
It's her. And that's close enough.
02/23/02
by ponderosa121