Author: Flamika
Website: www.angelfire.com/gundam/drownedworld/
Warnings: angst
Summary: An unlikely person helps to ease Relena’s pain one night.
Written on a request from ‘Lena Yuy from Gundam Wing Hideout! Here you go, ‘Lena-sama! Don’t know if this is what you wanted, but anyways! ^_^ Girl Power!!
**************
The world looked so different from behind a pair of sunglasses. Darker. The shadows were deeper and hungrier looking. The faces of people she passed wore expressions that seemed more forbidding than Relena knew they were. Of course, maybe they had always been so cold and isolated, and she had just refused to see it. A misjudgment on her part.
Sort of like what had happened with Heero Yuy.
//No matter how hard I try
You keep pushing me aside
And I can't break through
There's no talking to you//
Carefully, Relena adjusted her dark sunglasses and glanced coolly around the bar at an environment that was almost entirely alien to her. She had only been in a bar once before, on her eighteenth birthday when Dorothy and Sally had practically kidnapped her and dragged her into one of the local bars. However, that night of celebration had taken place in a refined, high-class establishment where the bartender dressed in a pristine shirt and black pants. He had only had polite words to say to the Vice Foreign Minister and her two wild Preventer friends. The customers at the bar, even the inebriated ones, had smiled at her and toasted to her good health with their martinis, thanking her drunkenly but politely for all she had done for Earth and the colonies.
This bar, however, was very different.
The floor was concrete, the lighting dim and hazy from cigarette smoke, the people rowdy and uncouth. The bartender looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks, and there were several drunken squabs taking place at various tables.
As Relena made her way calmly towards the bar, she knew that she should be worried out of her mind. A bar like this was a dangerous place for a woman alone. She had purposely dressed down, discarding her usual wardrobe of soft pastels and lace collars for a black shirt of an elegant cut and a knee-length skirt as black as night. Her long golden hair had been severely pinned down in knot at the back of her graceful neck, and she wore dark sunglasses over her blue eyes. In short, she had left Vice Foreign Minister Relena Darlian back at her mansion. She was now just another nameless girl seeking to drown all her sorrows in alcohol.
Ignoring the hungry looks some of the men gave her, she took a seat on the bar next to a dark-haired man who had his head down on the bar. Shifting slightly, she winced at how uncomfortable the seat was.
This is so unlike me…what am I doing here? All over one man…
The bartender lumbered over, looking her up and down with unveiled interest. “What’s your poison, baby?” he asked gruffly.
Relena gestured to her unconscious partner. “Whatever he’s having.”
The bartender snorted and walked off.
Relena sighed and leaned heavily against the wooden bar, feeling lonelier than she ever had in years. Her heart suddenly began to sing its mournful song that had become sort of a mantra, repeating the incantation over and over until an ache began to build in her chest. A film of tears descended over her eyes, and she felt her hands start to shake.
Heero…why? After all that happened, after all that we’ve fought and suffered through together, you’re leaving?
//So sad that you're leaving
Takes time to believe it//
Heero Yuy had always been an enigmatic young man, let there be no doubt about that. His mood swings were unpredictable and sometimes violent, part of what made his personality so alluring. He answered to nobody and no one and had a set of ideals so complex and intricate that their very combined light dwarfed those of the most influential people in the Earth Sphere United Nations. He had no equal, no person to complement him, no soul mate.
Except for Relena Darlian Peacecraft, the young woman flung into a world of politics and war at a tender age and nearly drowned on several instances by obstacles and deterrents that sought to hold her down. But nothing could contain her. With a bleeding heart and a will of iron, she took on the world and brought it to its senses a dozen times over. With her own strength and the face of Heero Yuy engraved on the tenderest regions of her heart, she fought her own war with OZ and emerged triumphant. And when Mariemaia Kushrenada rose from the ashes to fan the flames of war once more, she adapted herself to the changing times, and, recovering from her dark epiphany faster than anyone could have ever imagined possible, combined her unique powers with Heero Yuy one last time to extinguish that which would have burned the lives of hundreds of people away.
That was the Relena Darlian that the people knew.
How could she let the public know how much the last year had tormented her? Everyone knew that Heero Yuy had mysteriously disappeared almost right after Mariemaia’s uprising and hadn’t shown his face since then. Everyone knew that the Vice Foreign Minister was continuing with her speeches for peace and the will to fight for that peace. But did they know the grief she felt whenever she walked up to the podium? Did they know about that breathless, heartbreaking moment when she scanned the crowd desperately in search of the face of the man who meant more to her than anything in the world? Did they know how she longed to see a pair of Prussian blue eyes staring up at her from a mass of faceless people?
No, of course they couldn’t know. No one could ever know. Always a secret…
//But after all is said and done
You're going to be the lonely one,
Ohh Oh//
At least no one knows me here, she thought, staring blankly into the glass of nameless alcohol that the bartender had placed in front of her sometime during her morbid musings. No one to judge me. No one to ask why I’m out here at a bar…
“Relena?” a slurred voice suddenly asked.
Oh…crap…
Relena’s eyes widened behind her sunglasses, but she turned to her right and was shocked to see that her unconscious bar buddy was none other than Chang Wufei. He was still slouched against the bar counter, staring up at her with eyes darker than midnight, squinting slightly as if she were a bright light that was blinding him. It was only now that she realized he was dressed in a Preventer jacket. She hadn’t seen the emblem before because he had been laying on it.
“Hello, Wufei,” she said flatly, not at all pleased to see him there. She and Wufei had never been the best of friends. In fact, they had never been friends, period. For obvious reasons, of course. One, she was a woman. Two, she was a promoter of peace. To Chang Wufei, that was the most repulsive combination in the entire universe.
“Woman,” Wufei growled, eyebrows coming together in a scowl. “Why in the world are you wearing sunglasses at night?”
“They help me spot drunken assholes,” Relena said before she could stop herself. She was in a miserable mood, but she knew that no matter how unkind Wufei had been to her in the past, he wasn’t deserving of the treatment he was receiving.
“I see you’ve been hanging around Dorothy Catalonia way too much,” Wufei commented, undaunted by her uncharacteristically vicious retort. “Her sly ways are rubbing off on you, it seems.”
Relena sighed, already tired of talking with him. Actually, it was talking with another person, period, that was wearing her out.
“Wufei,” she said. “Just ask me why I’m here and get it over with.”
He snorted. “I already know why you’re here, Peacecraft.”
Relena lifted an eyebrow so that it rose just above the top of her glasses. “Oh? Is that so?” she asked, thinking he was just babbling drunkenly.
Wufei made a face at her, black eyes staring at her intensely even though it was very clear that he was intoxicated. “Yes, that is so,” he replied grumpily, words only slightly slurred.
“Then do enlighten me.”
Because I’m not even sure what I’m doing here…
“You’re depressed because Heero Yuy isn’t coming back.”
//Do you believe in life after love
I can feel something inside me say
I really don't think you're strong enough, No//
A jolt of pain went through Relena’s heart at the mention of the name. She turned away from Wufei and stared down into her untouched glass of alcohol, watching the lights glittering over the liquid’s surface. She said nothing, but inside there were a dozen nameless emotions crying out for recognition.
Wufei sighed and turned in his stool so that he was facing her completely, with one elbow resting next to his empty shot glass. “Why did you even bother with him in the first place?” he demanded of her.
Because…because he was so strong. His presence in the room just compelled me to pay attention to him, to follow him, to long for him, to…love him. It was something that I had no control over. I hated that…I hated being under his control…
“Leave me alone, Wufei,” Relena said coldly.
“Why?” he snapped, dark eyebrows coming together in one of his perpetual scowls. “So you can sit here and get wasted and then get gutted by some serial killer as you totter home?”
Well, when he puts it that way…
“Leave me alone,” Relena repeated, but her resolve was slightly weaker this time.
“Aren’t Zechs and the others worried about you?” he asked suddenly, shrewd obsidian eyes studying her profile.
She resisted the urge to squirm underneath that stare. “I’m sure they are,” she said calmly. Her heart gave a hollow whimper at the thought of the ones she cared for worrying about her.
“And you’ll sit here and let them worry themselves sick so you can lament your miserable existence just because some stupid man disappeared from your life?”
“Heero Yuy was no stupid man,” Relena snapped, wrapping her hands tightly around her glass to keep them from shaking. There was an ache building in her chest, and her eyes began that telltale stinging.
No, you will NOT cry now, not in front of Chang Wufei.
“What was he then, Peacecraft?” the Chinese man demanded, leaning in closer to her.
“He was my friend,” Relena said, surprised at how steady her voice sounded. “He and I were…friends…and I…I…”
“You loved him,” Wufei stated plainly and without tact, as usual.
Her heart began to bleed.
“Yes,” she whispered, eyes shutting tightly as her vision swam with forbidden tears. “Yes, I did.”
//Do you believe in life after love
I can feel something inside me say
I really don't think you're strong enough, No//
Wufei fell silent, but Relena could feel his eyes boring into the side of her face, as if he were trying to see into her mind and read her thoughts. She was past caring, though. All her thoughts were of Heero now, as if the fact that she had admitted her love for the ex-Gundam pilot aloud had completely consummated the horrible reality that she couldn’t live without him.
But that isn’t right! she suddenly thought, a spark of anger emerging from her heart. She didn’t know with whom she was angry with: Wufei, for making her even more miserable than she already was, Heero, for walking out like he didn’t give a damn for other people’s feelings, or with herself, for being so weak.
Why DO I need him? Relena wondered feverishly. Surely he knew how I felt. I practically wore my heart out on my sleeve and bared my soul for him to see. And after all that…he just LEAVES?! Without so much as a goodbye to anyone? Not even his best friend, Duo, has heard from him. What was wrong with us, Heero? Why did you reject all we had to offer – all I had to offer? Heero…I loved you…
“Heero,” she whispered softly, but the name sounded alien on her lips. It was then that she realized it had been a long time since she had called his name. A very long time.
Silence reigned once again as Relena violently searched the whirlwind of emotions in her heart for the answer as to why she was still holding onto Heero Yuy like the fleeting whispers of a lost dream just before waking. Why? Why did her heart still bleed for him? And why did he deserve her heart’s blood and her eyes’ tears?
Why?
“Peacecraft,” Wufei suddenly said, and Relena jumped slightly. She had almost forgotten he was there.
“What is it?” she asked grumpily, opening her eyes but refusing to look at him.
“C’mere,” he said in a confidential tone, leaning closer. “I want to tell you a secret.”
Surprised, Relena turned to see him staring at her with an odd, slightly amused expression on his face. Drunkenness had lent a pink flush to his bronze cheeks, but those onyx eyes of his burned with the same naked intensity that she had always remembered them having. For some reason, Relena had never liked looking into Wufei’s eyes. Maybe the fact that they seemed to be woven of pure darkness bothered her, or maybe it was because she couldn’t find any hint of a pupil within those inky depths. Whatever the case, the feel of those eyes on her made her uncomfortable, but it also made her heartbeat strangely rapid in her chest.
“Wufei,” she said firmly. “You’re drunk. Leave me alone, why don’t you?”
Wufei shook his head in a strange, melancholy fashion. “I don’t think so.”
Good God…he’s even more incorrigible when he’s drunk than when he’s sober…
But Relena was in no mood for arguing. “Fine,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll listen to you.”
Wufei lifted an eyebrow and crooked his finger at her. “Then,” he said, as if he were talking to a child. “Come here.”
She hesitated for a moment more, wondering what he had up his sleeve. But then she heaved another sigh and leaned in slightly closer to him. Wufei shocked her by suddenly reaching forward and wrapping his right arm around her shoulders, tugging her forward until their faces were separated by mere inches, eliciting a small gasp from her. His breath was warm against her cheek, smelling slightly of alcohol, and his midnight black eyes were all she saw.
“Wufei…” she whispered in surprise, for some reason thinking it inappropriate to yell when she was so close to him.
“Be quiet,” he ordered, a mixture of softness and steel in his voice. “Relena Darlian, I’ve been listening to you preach peace for three long years, but now it’s time for you to listen to someone else for a change.”
Relena said nothing, slightly mesmerized by his long eyelashes fluttering down briefly over his black eyes.
“Fine,” she murmured. “What’s this big secret of yours?”
A smile curled half of Wufei’s mouth, and looking right into her eyes, he said quite clearly, “All men are assholes.”
Relena’s blue eyes widened, not sure if she had been hearing things or not. Did Chang Wufei just say what she thought he said? But before she could articulate some way to express her incredulity, Wufei was going on in a voice that was neither harsh nor mean-spirited, but instead firm and unwavering.
“Woman, you’re stronger than the world. You know that, don’t you? Lowering yourself down to this level, coming into a place like this…it’s a criminal waste of your strength and abilities, Relena. You’ve taken on war headlong and beat it every time. Are you going to let one blind stupid man destroy it all for you? Destroy the woman that you have become? Well, are you?”
“But…” Relena found herself protesting, more out of habit than anything else. She had had this argument with herself a dozen times. “If…if it weren’t for Heero, nothing I have ever accomplished would have been possible. That’s the horrible truth, Wufei…”
//What am I supposed to do
Sit around and wait for you
And I can't do that
There's no turning back//
His grip around her shoulders tightened slightly. “Is that what you tell yourself every night, then?” he demanded. “Instead of praying to whatever God you believe in, do you thank Heero Yuy for being the only thing he could be? A soldier? Or is he a god to you? Has Heero become your god?”
Has he?
“No,” she suddenly found herself saying, the words coming out more powerful than she had been expecting. “Heero Yuy is no god.”
“Then?” Wufei said softly, leaning in so close that their noses were nearly touching. “Get over it woman. He’s gone and that’s that. If he couldn’t see all the glory and happiness that you had laid before him, then that’s his goddamn problem. Just because he might not have been strong enough to handle this life that he helped forge with his own hands, doesn’t mean that you haven’t that strength.”
“Wufei…” Relena whispered, unable to believe that these words were coming from his lips. “Why…why are you telling me all this?”
Fathomless black eyes slowly slipped closed as if in remembrance, and when Wufei spoke again, there was a low, guttural edge of divine sadness in his voice. “You only live once, Relena,” he said softly, voice coming as a whisper against her skin. “But you can certainly love more than once. Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘If you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, then it’s meant to be?’”
Relena couldn’t only nod mutely. She could tell these words were causing him great pain.
He suddenly opened his eyes and stared right into hers. “Some things never return, Relena. They up and fly away, no matter how tenacious your hold is on them. And you just have to live with it – deal with it on your own. Be strong, Relena, and be happy for Heero. Happy that he has finally found his freedom, wherever it may be…”
Pulling away slightly, he slowly lifted his other hand and placed it over her heart, the warmth of his bare palm seeping through the fabric of her shirt to whisper across her skin. Scarcely knowing what she was doing, Relena lifted both of her hands and placed them over his, slim fingers intertwining with his.
“Wufei…why?” she found herself asking again, eyes glittering with unshed tears.
Wufei shook his head and said quietly, “There is no ‘why’. Asking why will get you nowhere. Just know that you’re not the only one whose heart bleeds for those long gone, Relena.”
Those…long gone…
But just as his words were starting to sink in, she suddenly felt his hand sliding out from underneath hers, leaving a cold, empty area in its place. He averted his eyes from hers as he removed his hand from her shoulders and slid off the stool slowly, as if he wasn’t sure that he wanted to leave.
But he did start to leave, one shaky step after the other, boots thudding hollowly against the concrete floor.
“Wufei,” Relena suddenly spoke up.
He turned so that she could see his profile and the doorway waiting for him on the other side of the room. “Yes?” he responded.
“What was her name?” she asked softly.
“Meiran,” Wufei replied immediately, saying the name delicately, as if tasting it. “Meiran Chang…but I called her…Nataku.” He turned around slightly, and black eyes met blue, something secretive and entirely personal passing between them. “I used to think she was the strongest woman in the universe. I don’t know whether to thank you or not for proving me wrong.”
Relena’s eyes widened. Her heart bled for him as she watched him walk away and out the door, disappearing into the night like a wingless angel returning to its dark shore. To think that Wufei, of all people, was the one to know her pain. She didn’t know why he had been at the bar, but she was glad that he had been. Very glad.
Gently, she rested her hands over her heart, in the same place where Wufei had laid his hand moments before. She felt her heart beating strongly within its cage of flesh and bone, bleeding for painful memories never to be forgotten, only cherished and learned from. And slowly, she felt the warmth from her own hands cauterize that terrible wound that Heero Yuy had left behind with his departure, sealing it up tightly while melting the ice that had been threatening to freeze her soul from the inside.
************
//I need time to move on
I need love to feel strong//
It was nearly dawn when Relena suddenly became aware that she was still sitting alone in the bar, lost in her thoughts as she stared into her untouched glass of alcohol as if that poisonous liquid held the secrets of the universe. Her blue eyes, still hidden behind her sunglasses, were misted in deep, dark contemplation until a small smile touched her lips, as if she had some grand secret that no one else knew. No one else but those that could truly understand her.
Adjusting her sunglasses, Relena rose from her uncomfortable seat and straightened her skirt with a deft motion.
“Heero,” she said to her glass of alcohol, who had been her passive listener for the entire night. “I’m leaving now. I’ll always love you, but now, Heero, my heart and my tears – they are no longer for you.”
“Woman, you’re stronger than the world…are you going to let a blind stupid man destroy all that you have become? Well, are you?”
//'Cause I've had time to think it through
And maybe I'm too good for you Ohh//
“Goodbye, Heero,” she told the glass softly, a gentle smile on her lips as she lifted it and placed it behind the counter, out of sight and out of mind.
She was just turning to go when heavy footsteps thudding on the concrete floor made her stop in her tracks.
“You didn’t even drink your poison, lady,” the bartender told her, staring at the untouched glass of alcohol.
Relena turned around and said politely. “I’m sorry. I’ll be happy to pay for it if you would like me to.”
The man looked her up and down, taking in the willowy limbs and the strong beauty of her face. Then he suddenly lifted the alcohol and drank it down in one huge gulp, letting out a disgusting belch afterwards.
“It’s on me, baby,” he told Relena.
Resisting the urge to scream in disgust, she smiled politely and said, “Well, I’m sorry for troubling you. I’ll be heading home now.”
Turning, she walked swiftly away, wanting to get out of the bar as quickly as possible. She had her hand on the door when the bartender suddenly called to her.
“Hey, lady!”
//But I know that I'll get through this
'Cause I know that I am strong
I don't need you anymore//
Rolling her eyes behind her glasses, Relena turned and said, “Yes?”
The bartender leaned his bulk on the counter and studied her. “You famous or something?”
“What makes you ask that?”
He shrugged his hefty shoulders. “You walk a certain way. You’re clothes are expensive-looking and all. And you still wearin’ those sunglasses.”
Famous? Hmm…
“Yes,” Relena said. “Sure, I’m famous.”
The bartender’s eyes shot up so far they threatened to disappear into his hairline. “Really?” he echoed. “You know, you seem kinda lonely. Are you looking for a friend, lady?” he asked, eyeing her with interest, as if the fact that she was “famous” had made her all the more beautiful. His eyes were all over her.
“All men are assholes…”
Relena smiled sweetly and adjusted her sunglasses before opening the door, letting the rising sunlight burn the darkness in the room. The bartender squinted as her figure was lost in the light.
“I thank you for your kind offer,” she said politely, though this man deserved so much less. “But I’m no man’s woman.”
And she vanished out the door and into the light.
THE END
//Oh I don't need you anymore
I don't need you anymore
No I don't need you anymore//
************
Author’s Note: Well, ‘Lena-sama, I tried, neh? -_- Not the most
compelling piece of fiction, but it’s alright, I guess! I should stick to
writing yaoi, huh? Just kidding, ‘Lena! Don’t scream! ^_~ Comments always
welcome! ^_^