Author: Chauni

Website: www.oocities.org/asukalangley2nd/

Warnings: Angst, Language, Yaoi

Pairings: 1x2, 1x3, 3x4, 5+2

Disclaimer: I don’t own GW. Made not one dime off this, so no suing please.

In Wake of the Soul

I have finally abandoned hope.

I never thought I would actually say those words, and even now, I regret it. I feel like I have betrayed my comrades, but in reality, I’m only facing the obvious. It’s taken me six months to see the demon that has been tormenting me over my shoulder the entire time; I have always been too afraid to look him in the face, I suppose. I am closing a door in my life that I do not want to, but it’s time; I know that as a soldier.

Quatre…Wufei…Duo…

You know, I hate myself for being alive. I despise every day I wake up and see the sun glaring down on me and I loathe the way the birds sing when I step outside. I cannot stand the sight of my own face or the people that call out my name in admiration, and all because I am alive.

It was six months ago; everything after that seems a little hazy, fuzzy like I just woke up. Quatre, Duo, and Wufei had all received mission orders, which left Trowa and I in the country safehouse on a boring Sunday. Of course, I vacated to the bedroom I shared with Duo, seating myself in front of my laptop, fingers flying across the keyboard in blurring clicks and clacks. Trowa was in the living room, languidly sitting before the red couch, half reading a book, half watching the television. He was always good at doing that sort of thing, you know, doing two things at once and keeping his attention evenly dispersed through both. It sort of surprised me that he wasn’t outside, enjoying the spring air or working on Heavyarms, but I wasn’t about to question his motives. Whatever he wanted to do was up to him.

“Heero! Come here!”

The yell was urgent and shockingly frightened. I leaped from my seat, the chair toppling in my hurried wake. I bolted through the hall and into the living room, questions on my lips that never got a chance to be asked.

I took two faltering steps into the room, and then fell to my knees. My eyes never left the television screen and the macabre scene played out on it like an over-exaggerated fictitious horror story. Giant pieces of metal littered an apparent military base, most of them the familiar drab olive green chunks of Leo mobile suits. Trucks and people scurried around, frantic as if the sky was falling, and tending to the wounded that were scattered everywhere. People, all soldiers and covered in blood and dirt, shuffled away with the helps of others, while some were carried off under white, crimson stained sheets.

The camera swung around, then focused in on several completely different scraps of metal, each one burned almost beyond recognition. People swarmed them like ants on dropped sweets, crawling and throwing the pieces aside, then yelling to other soldiers around them.

I knew what they were. How could I not? They were as familiar to my eyes as my own face.

Shenlong, once so lovingly worshiped by the honorable Wufei, was tattered and twisted, as if it had been burned and placed on the rack. Sandrock was utterly demolished, nothing but the torso remaining and even that was almost totally flat and burning inside. Deathscythe, oh god, Deathscythe. It took me more than a minute to even be able to distinguish it from any other random destroyed Leo suit; there was nothing left.

“Duo…”

The horrifying scene switched, a pretty young anchorwoman now filling the screen. Her face was grimly set while small pictures from the nightmare played over her right shoulder, burning themselves into my mind forever.

“And, just to recap, the Lake Victoria base was once again the target of a Gundam attack. However, after a long and torturous battle, they were overpowered and destroyed by the OZ military, as you can see by these exclusive channel fourteen pictures. So far, there are a confirmed seventy-seven casualties, and twenty-four missing in action. Also, the three Gundam pilots are presumed dead, although no identifiable bodies have been recovered from their wreckages. Keep tuned into channel fourteen for the remainder of the day for the up to the minute updates on this tragedy.”

They were all dead. Before I could even think anything, the soldier part of me kicked in then, controlling my thoughts in the emotionless manner it usually did, and that was when I began hating myself. I wanted to mourn, but that would have been weak and pointless, now wouldn’t it?

They died beautifully. They gave their lives for the cause; they served their purpose. No use crying over them. They did what was expected of them.

A sound, sort of like choking and yelping, wedged itself from my tight throat. I didn’t want to think that way, not about my friends, my companions, the only people I have ever truly trusted. I didn’t want to think of Duo, lying in his blood-splattered cockpit, his lips cold and blue and cracked as his vibrant violet eyes stared flatly at nothing. I didn’t want to think of his braid, half undone, covered in his own flesh and life, or how cold his skin felt, like marble rather than the heated fire it usually lit within me. I didn’t want to think of his cross, lying over a throat that would never draw breath again.

No! I won’t believe this! Death cannot die!

I collapsed forward, supporting myself on my hands. My head hung low, dark bangs shielding my weeping crushed face. I felt so weak, so useless.

I looked up and over to Trowa, my mouth drying up as I saw the suffering within his every delicate action. His hand lay across the flashing screen of the television, as if he could touch his beloved Quatre one last time. His head was dangling as well, deep honeyed hair half hiding his beautiful face. His emerald eyes stared down, sparkling with tears as the anchorwoman rambled on about the Gundam pilot’s deaths and the horror at the base. Each word that passed through that woman’s lips made me want to kill her more, to stop her lies about their death.

But Trowa, he looked so alive, even as he was dying before me. I don’t think I have ever seen anything more heavenly. How sick does that sound? Here we were, both of our lovers and a mutual fried, dead, freaking dead, and I was staring at him in pure awe as his heart was being thoroughly crushed right before my eyes. I admit, I feel so wicked thinking it, but it’s true.

He was exquisite.

I’d like to say things went smoothly after that, but I’d only be fooling myself. We took it upon ourselves to utterly decimate the Lake Victoria base; they couldn’t have made even a lunchbox with what very little scrap metal we left behind. We fought with fury that we never knew existed; if we had, this war would’ve been over before it started.

After that, things got fuzzy. Only a few instances remain crystal clear, as if peering through freshly cleaned glass. One day, I swore I saw Duo, eating at a restaurant, stuffing his face with a hamburger while endlessly talking to some girl who sat to the left of him. I blinked, my heart skipping and feeling alive for the first time in weeks, and looked again, realizing with frustration that it wasn’t him. I went home and did not move from the computer from the remainder of the day and well into the next one.

My most vivid memory is of Trowa, his life being more lucid than my own. I recall one day, walking into Trowa’s bedroom, wanting to ask him some stupid pointless question, most likely because I missed the constant ramblings of the braided baka. To my disbelief, I found him sitting, shirtless, on the edge of his bed. A picture sat beside him, the most stunning one of Quatre I had ever seen; his eyes glittered with immortal life and naive innocence, his hair fell into against his cheeks like gold silk, shimmering like the sun. He looked like an angel; how weird it was that he was one now.

However, Trowa sat beside it, blood running down his upturned arm in a river, forking at his splayed fingers and dripping into a rapidly growing pool onto the white carpet. He didn’t see me walk in and kept carving at the pale flesh of his inner arm with a dulled army knife. It took me a moment to finger out what he was writing, realizing I had stopped him in the middle of a ragged “A”. Scraggly, it so far read, “Q U A”.

Trowa looked up to me, nothing riding in his dead eyes but steely tears. The crimson blood continued to pump forth with unstoppable fervor, bubbling over like beer from a shaken can, dripping onto the carpet with soft splattering sounds that seemed an eternity away.

“I miss him.”

Oh, he did more than miss him, that was sure. I grabbed his discarded shirt that lay nearby and wrapped his arm in it, watching as the white material instantly darkened with blood. Trowa looked at me perplexed, as if to question my motives or humanity.

I looked back at him, the soldier taking control as usual. “You cannot do this to yourself. You are no good to either of us like this.”

“I have lost my reason to fight,” he whispered back, his voice as flat as his eyes.

I used the one thing that I could, and I can admit now that I said it so he wouldn’t die and I could use him later on; I couldn’t lose all my fighters, all my pilots.

I know, I’m a bastard.

“Quatre would not have wanted you to be acting like this,” I said, putting more pressure on his arm than probably necessary. “You are disgracing his memory by doing this.” I silently chuckled to myself, noting with odd offhandedness, how much I resembled Wufei.

Trowa looked at me, still a living dead boy, but resigned to fight, for Quatre’s memory at least.

Things are funny. Upon giving up all hope of the safe return of my companions, I figured things would’ve become easier for me. In essence, by discarding all hope, I was gaining hope that my agonized life would return to normal. Ironic, huh?

I was wrong. I suppose this was the first time I could truly mourn, now laying their souls to rest within me, as if I was the cold ground that their bodies were now residing in. It hurt, probably more than anything, but only because it was a new wound, one that I haven’t felt before, something beyond even emotion.

Yes, contrary to popular belief, I feel. I have loved and do still. Duo, from the first time we were together, was my breath, and with him gone, he has taken that from me as well. I love him still; and for that reason alone, I move on and I fight, because that is what he would have wanted me to do.

In his death, I live for him.

Trowa is getting better, although it is very slow in coming. His eyes are still dead, but he speaks now, and can hold a short conversation. He ventures outside a lot, especially now that the winter is here and the snow is crisp and clean, just like Quatre was. I think it gives him comfort, but I could be wrong.

And that leads me to now; recuperation of ourselves. Our cores have been damaged, yet we fight on. And I respect Trowa, and I live for our memories, and for the humanity that survives with our skills. And I live for Quatre, and I live for Wufei, and most of all, I live for Duo. And things become easier, and I think I can love again, and perhaps, so can he.

I hope so.

The End