Home before Midnight [Chapter 4: Catharsis]
Title: Home before Midnight
Rating: T
Pairing: Quatre Winner x Dorothy Catalonia
Status: Complete
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing and all its characters © Sotsu Agency, Sunrise, and TV Asahi; The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003 by MacAdam/Cage, is authored by Audrey Niffenegger. All fics are not for profit.
Series summary: Quatre is fifteen when he first met sixteen-year-old Dorothy, and she is nine when she met a twenty-year-old Quatre. This is what's normal for them: getting to know each other one day at a time, though not necessarily in chronological order.
Notes: You can also read it here. Inspired by The Time Traveler's Wife.
Chapter 1: Convergence
Chapter 2: Mobius Strip
Chapter 3: Tempus Frangit
Chapter 4: Catharsis:
“The body is like a clock, the workings of which were determined by the shapes and positions of its interlocking parts.”- Santorio Santorio
November 11, 195. Quatre is 15, Dorothy is 16.
An earsplitting crash and a little earthquake shook him awake from his stupor. He blinked images of his last time-travel away and rushed to the secret hangar (that wasn’t secret anymore, after Noin revealed everything to Relena following the attack on the Kingdom). A mountain of white and violet metals-a Taurus MS-was sprawled on the floor, and some of the chains and cranes that were supposed to hold it up were tangled with its steel limbs. There must be someone who tried to pilot it and failed. The cockpit door hissed rather balefully as it opened, and he skulked around it several times before peeking.
“Dorothy!” he exclaimed, and there she lied, pale rivulets of her hair pooling around the cockpit. She squinted, hugging the shoulder harness as she trembled, and only when he stuck his head inside did he learn she was actually giggling. “What are you doing?!” he rebuked. “It’s dangerous!”
“Quatre” was the only comprehensible word he heard from her; everything else was drowned in her chuckles. He anchored himself lower inside when she awkwardly gesticulated for him to come closer.
“When are you coming from?” she muttered, cupping his face. As if his expression answered her, she said, “Oh yes, of course, I forgot…Yes, the present…” She pressed a light kiss on his lips, and he was surprised that he was not surprised at all. It felt so normal, so practiced, like she has been doing it to him all his life. He felt her arms smoothly slither around him like eels.
“You said I’ll know how to maneuver a mobile-something,” she said, her tone a tad frustrated. “Why can’t I pilot this thing?”
She was talking about a Quatre from the future, obviously. The little revelation scared him a bit, part because he was worried about her getting physically involved in the war, and part because he knew she could be a very formidable enemy. It was not her choice, but she was not on their side from the very start.
“I haven’t told you anything about mobile suits,” he said. “Not yet.”
“You’re…”
“Fifteen years old. The present, remember?”
“Oh. Right.”
A short stretch of silence reigned over them. She carefully brushed his bangs away so she could look at him straight in the eyes, and there was something in hers that made him ask apprehensively, “Am I different? You’ve met older versions of me. Am I so different from what you expected?”
“Not really,” she answered earnestly. “You’re still the you I’ve met before. You didn’t change much when you reached twenty-three…or is it twenty-four? I’m not sure, it’s very confusing.”
“Confusing indeed,” he breathed into her hair, and he decided that the smell of artificial fruit in shampoos was not bad at all. He pulled his head back and frowned. Did he just nuzzle her?
“I don’t believe you can be confused,” Dorothy whispered. “Poleaxing me has been your leisure pursuit, and with that list of dates I thought your travels are well-planned.”
“They’re not,” he sighed. “I just wish I can control my travels so I can plan everything. It’s hard being ignorant about this “impairment” and I doubt if there’s a doctor around who knows what to do about this. Anyway, I beg to differ about the poleaxing part-you are the one who’s always leaving me flabbergasted. Beating me at chess as a little horror eight years my junior, then stunning me as a twenty-something goddess with our daughter…”
She was smiling and she balked at the last words. “Our daughter? We’re going to have a girl?”
“Oh. Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“Did she take after you?”
She’s so beautiful, exactly like you, he thought, but did not say. “I’m sorry. Classified information.”
She beamed. “That’s so you. You always keep every ‘future’ thing from me, though sometimes your impervious walls would crumble against my wheedling ways. But…”
“But what?” He suppressed the urge to ask what those ‘wheedling ways’ were.
“There’s something a bit different about you. Ignoring the fact that you know our daughter, you’re less. I mean, before, you’re sort of…more. You know me back then, so-”
“So right now you’re telling me I’m somewhat gauche.”
“No,” she laughed. “But thinking about it now, yes, I guess you’re right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize for everything, you know. But don’t stop pouting, it’s adorable.”
He blinked. “I’m not even pouting.”
“I just love it when you protrude your lips like that-”
“I said I’m not pouting.”
She chortled. “Believe it or not, five years or more from now you’re still reiterating that statement accompanied by a fleshy jut of your lower lip. I started teasing you about it when I was ten.”
He hummed and inhaled her scent again, for a moment not knowing what else to say to that.
“Quatre?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you love me now?”
He blinked at the question, taken aback. Would she laugh if I say yes? he asked himself, he asked his Space Heart. Would she be hurt if I say no? He loved her in her yesterday, he loved her in his tomorrow. Now that their times have finally intertwined, what should he feel? Honestly speaking, he was just plain afraid at this very minute.
Afraid that he was indeed in love.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said soothingly. “Call me overoptimistic or narcissistic or anything, but I know you love me. In some other time, if not now. Be assured that my heart is only yours. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime?” In the meager brightness of the cockpit he saw her blushing cheeks. Could she see his?
“Oh Quatre, I know you don’t know me well yet, but can’t you guess a thing or two?”
Quatre couldn’t get an inkling of what she was saying until she commenced going through the layered fortresses of his Sanc school uniform. The warmth of her nimble fingertips turned his arms into dense lumps of gooseflesh even before they come in direct contact with his skin. Soon, he found himself unclasping her from the complicated safety straps and belts, planting warm kisses wherever he could spot the buttermilk color of her skin.
“Naughty at fifteen,” he heard Dorothy’s seductive sigh in his left ear.
The hell with virtue. After she was fully freed from the harness, he easily figured out the mechanics of her dress.
Various dates. Quatre is 15.
He attempted to find patterns or clues that would signal another trip, thinking it was like a disease that would show symptoms. He studied the dates, felt the dents and dips of each letter and number on the paper, even made mini-Rosarche tests out of the clumsy inkblots adorning a kindergartener Dorothy’s cacography-all just to know if there was a certain logic or rule in these weird dislocations. Everything was in vain, of course.
The thought that it was a punishment did cross his mind. Some of his travels would click open the lock of his closet and every rotting skeleton he crammed there would topple out, deriding and accusing him. For more than a score he had gone back to the day of his father’s death and he watched helplessly at his grief-stricken self, the bloodcurdling screams becoming the odious soundtrack of his fractured timeline. He had gone back to the day he eradicated a colony in the space map with a single shot, he witnessed Trowa’s sacrifice again and again as though it was a video set to replay itself after it reached the ending.
In all of these there was nothing he could do. He longed to yell “Go away Trowa, the me you’re talking to won’t listen!” or “Hey me! Calm down please, you don’t know what you’re doing! It’s war, things like this happen, things like-” and he would stop, realizing that the words were just in his head and they would never come out his mouth. He couldn’t change anything; he couldn’t save his father, or Trowa, or himself. The next thing he’d see was the medicine bottle-blue of outer space, the scene blurred with his tears, the afterglow of explosion still lingering.
The thought that it might be a gift did cross his mind, too, because if it weren’t for this impairment he wouldn’t have met his mother. He remembered the first date of his parents, when he offered Quatrina a seat on the train; he remembered how she laughed at a young Zayeed, who shot him a warning glare. He pretended to bump into her so he would feel she was real, he shocked her-in a variety of age and places-by mumbling random I-love-you’s and giving her “accidental” hugs. That made him appear like some kind of a maniac, but he couldn’t care less. Every episode was refreshing and everything felt right and real…
…except that day when he noticed a growing lump on Quatrina’s belly.
All Winner children were incubated in test tubes, he was certain about that. He debunked his ‘it’s just baby fat’ theory when her tummy got a tad too big, and when everything else pointed to the possibility that she might be expecting, he couldn’t do anything but cave in.
“Let’s name him Quatre,” she told Zayeed one day, delicately cradling her stomach.
No, it can’t be me, he told himself, even though he confirmed his birthday was only two months away from that date. The next thing he knew, he had travelled two months forward, and he witnessed how the boy that was him cried to life while a smiling Quatrina pass away on the sheets.
Of course. It was always his fault.
His father must have thought he would blame himself for her death, or perhaps they thought he would feel special and superior to his other siblings if he knew this. Either way, he couldn’t change anything. She still died, and he still lived.
The day he learned of this revelation, the situation in his present has gone worse. He and the other Gundam pilots-including Trowa, who by some miracle was alive and only suffered from amnesia-joined forces to fight the paramilitary group called White Fang. Milliardo Peacecraft, its new leader, was hell-bent on ramming the completed space battleship Libra to Earth, thinking it would end all battles and they could start an era of peace.1 Quatre tried making sense of it but he simply couldn’t; it was the decision of a desperate man, someone who was playing god by punishing and destroying a vastly sinful place and starting over again. It wasn’t right. His Space Heart was telling him it wasn’t right.
Just when he was being goaded by these circumstances to break down, she would appear before him, assuring him that everything will fall right into place. Dorothy would be there as a girl, as a woman, as something in between, and there was no difference at all because she was his heroine. She wasn’t aware of this. She would be too engrossed when he would quiz her on multiplication tables, when he would teach her ‘Happy Birthday’ on the piano, or when he would correct the French terms she was shouting in their occasional fencing matches. She wasn’t aware that she was making him feel whole, even if in so many aspects he was broken beyond repair.
“You look tired,” a nine-year-old Dorothy said one time, curling against him like a hedgehog. “Something happened in the future? I mean, in your present?”
Yes, he thought. I’m onboard Peacemillion with the others, and we can’t think of a good plan to defeat the continuously increasing number of Mobile Doll troops. You’ve joined the White Fang, you know that? You’ve joined Zechs Merquise, or Milliardo Peacecraft, and you’re fighting against the Gundams. We’re enemies, you know that?
“Mr. Prince?”
He forced a smile. “No. Nothing happened, everything’s okay in my present.”
“You don’t look like a liar,” she said, “but when you try to be one you look as if you’re shouldering the problems of the whole world. Stop it.”
“Dorothy…”
She tore away from him when he moved to circle his arms around her. “I don’t like it when you lie. You really don’t know how to and your face is a dead giveaway, but I feel bad when you don’t want to say anything about it to me.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.” I tried to, but I really can’t.
“You don’t think I’ll understand, right? Because I’m just a kid?”
“That’s not it.”
Heaving a sigh, she slumped back to her position and let herself be enveloped by his arms. He buried his face in her hair, and for once he succumbed to the peace that only her presence could give him.
He wept.
December 9, 195. Quatre is 15, Dorothy is 16.
“So this is how the MD command system from Epyon operates,” Dorothy mused, warily watching the formulae in nixie tubes floating around the room. With the helmet on, everything seemed to emit a Pepto-Bismol pink glow. “Mr. Milliardo is a true genius. This way, even the soulless Mobile Dolls are able to fight with the mind of a human.”2
She pressed her palms on the system pad and maneuvered her new toys in organized phalanxes, her choreography for them ready. “Now my precious Dolls, let’s see a spectacular dance.”
She watched the marionettes comply with her whispers, and at first the whole show was gloriously beautiful. When the Gundams started dancing along with the beat she set, she knew there was something wrong.
“I don’t understand,” she said with a hiss. “The Gundams are predicting each of my moves! But how? What’s happening?!”
ZERO heard her. And it answered.
It showed her a memory from two years ago; the exact date was August 14. She was there, sitting sandwiched between a black-garbed woman she forgot the name of and her grandfather Dermail. Her face was half-hidden in the fishnet veil but she wasn’t crying. Dorothy remembered it well. She didn’t cry, because her father said that dying while fighting was not something to mourn about.
Some well-coiffed women on the next pew huddled close together and wept rather loudly, and Dorothy recalled the repugnance she harbored for them right that very moment. The priest intoned something she didn’t catch. She refocused and heard him saying, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the Bible says. It is war, and our brother chose the path of a true servant of peace; his soul will surely not rest in peace if we dwell on revenge. Let us instead follow the example Jesus has taught us: love thy neighbor. Let us leave everything to God, let us lift our hearts to Him…”
“I think I like the eye for an eye stuff better,” someone grumbled behind Dorothy. She wondered if there was someone else, aside from herself, who wasn’t disturbed by the tooth for a tooth part.
People were soon leaving and Dorothy felt the need to be alone so she joined the crowd. Of course, he would thwart her-he would never let her feel alone when he was there. Never.
“Quatre,” her voice broke when she saw him, a damned Moses who cleaved the sea of time, now struggling to cross the sea of fake people in attempt to reach her. She wanted to run to him but she was suddenly paralyzed. Her heart was drumming loud as he approached, and when they collided in a tight hug, her tears finally fell….
She blinked the memory away.
Of course, ZERO, she told the system. Someone who knows how I move, someone who knows how I think…there’s no one else but…
“Quatre Raberba Winner.”
She didn’t know if it was just some kind of auditory hallucination, but she thought she heard him say her name after the last syllable of his rolled off her tongue.
TBC...
A/N:
1. This occurred in the anime from Episode 40: A New Leader to Episode 43: Target: Earth. Milliardo Peacecraft plans to drop space battleship Libra on Earth so it would be plagued by a never-ending winter.
2. This scene is from Episode 44: Go Forth Gundam Team.
About the chapter title: Catharsis- in psychology, the process of bringing to surface repressed emotions, complexes, and feelings in an effort to identify or relieve them.
Chapter 5: Widow's Walk
Chapter 6: Always Again