He likes to watch the big birds soar. Eagles… hawks… crows… buzzards… it doesn’t much seem to matter. If it has broad, strong wings, it seems to bring him some sort of peace to just sit and watch them ride the thermals all lazy and slow.

He seems peaceful enough now, and I sure wish I could say I shared it, but… well… these earthside heights have never done much for me. I suppose there’s something to be said for the view… if you have the nerve to look down at it. I might give it a try if I can manage to figure out just how in the hell he got where he is, so I can finish climbing up to join him.

I stop for a minute and just watch him watch the birds; they won’t be out much longer… the day is wearing out. Truth be told… so am I. I flex my hands while I rest; that climb up the cables to get to the bridge structure had been taxing. I don’t need to be dealing with a cramp during this next part.

He doesn’t seem to have noticed me yet, which is… perplexing and a relief and something else I can’t name.

Whatever the hell we’re doing up here, I sure hope we can get it done without getting caught… I’ve heard they don’t just fine you for this sort of trespassing. And I’m pretty sure Commander Une would not be happy to have to bail two of her best and brightest out of the local jail for… I wasn’t sure what just yet.

I decide to risk the cramp in order to have the light for the next stage; I’ve pretty much been reduced to looking for signs of Heero’s route in order to figure out how one went about getting… there.

In the end, I understand how he managed it and sort of want to throw up, and decide I’m not going to make it without help. My brain can look at the jump he had to have made and go ‘piece of cake’, but my gut just looks and goes ‘check, please’.

It might have something to do with the nine hundred some-odd foot drop. I think it said on a plaque somewhere down there, but I hadn’t been interested in knowing on the way up. I was kind of not really interested in knowing now either, to be honest.

I don’t really want to startle him, though his seat looks solid enough, so I just sort of clear my throat. It takes a couple of tries before he hears it over the wind and he jerks just like I’d been afraid he would. I find I’m holding my breath, but there isn’t one of those awful, slow-motion, bad-movie moments and I let it out again in a gust.

‘Hey,’ I say, all suave and cool and shit.

He does do the slow blink thing, kind of like he can’t quite believe I’d be stupid enough to climb up some damn bridge in the near dark. ‘Duo? What the hell are you doing up here?’

I just manage to keep the laugh inside, toning it down to a quirk of a grin. ‘I think that’s my line, man.’

He stares at me for a long minute and I try really hard to read what I can. There’s the obvious disbelief that’s all tinted with exasperation. Those are the easy ones, but there’s something that wants to be relief and something else that wants to be irritation and something else that hasn’t finished gestating yet.

I hold out a hand. The one that isn’t wrapped white-knuckled around a cable. ‘Give me a hand over, will you?’ I ask and have to hold my breath again while he has to stand up to do it.

It’s not really even a jump, when you get down to it, more of a step across a gap. Having his hand wrapped around my forearm and mine around his, makes all the difference in the world. Still takes just about the last of my ‘uhmph’ though, and I’m more than happy to sit down with him once we’re together. Standing up in the wind is just not the most awesome sensation known to man.

We just sit there for a little while and watch the last of those big birds spiral down to whatever roosts they’re headed for, for the night. I try really, really hard to find some of the peace that this seems to give him, but there’s a tiny little voice in the back of my head that wants to discuss the climb back down, and it’s just kind of getting hard to ignore it as the sun is bleeding from the sky and it’s getting damn freaking dark.

‘Duo,’ he finally says. ‘Why on earth are you up here?’

‘I have no idea,’ I tell him amiably. ‘Just why are we up here?’

He kind of hates it when I answer a question with a question, and I kind of know that, and I kind of don’t really care in the moment. There are a couple of things going on here that I really hate too, so I figure it balances out. It takes him a long minute of staring at me before he decides what to say next.

‘I broke up with you,’ he says, kind of slow and deliberate. Like maybe I hadn’t gotten it the first time he said it eight/nine hours ago.

‘About that,’ I say, looking out and not at him. And not down either. ‘When we started this relationship, you asked me to move in with you, right?’

He takes it for a rhetorical question for a second before the long pause makes it obvious I’m waiting for an answer. So he gives me that huff of an affirmative of his, and I glance over at him, not sure if he gets the point I’m making.

‘And I accepted,’ I continue anyway. ‘So see, the way I look at this… we agreed to start, so we have to agree to stop. And I don’t. Agree, that is.’

The sun is completely gone by the time he works his way through that and bursts out with, ‘Are you kidding me? You came all the hell the way up here to… argue with me?’

‘Well, I’d have been more than happy to have this talk down on the ground,’ I grumble. ‘But you sort of didn’t hang around to have it.’

He’s quiet for a pretty long time and I watch him stare out at not much. There’s nothing like street or security lights at the level we’re at, but – thank god – there’s some decorative lighting or I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face. Not that my hand is in front of my face, mind you, it’s happily clutching the edge of the plate we’re sitting on.

‘I didn’t think there was anything more to talk about,’ he finally says, though the wind almost takes the words before I can catch them.

‘How about the why part?’ I ask him simply, and it makes his eyes narrow and his shoulders hunch.

I slide my free hand over to touch his, but he slides his away and I leave it go.

‘It’s just for the best,’ he finally says, but he still won’t look at me and if we were down on the ground, in our nice motel room, I’d be stomping around him and waving my arms and demanding better than that. But our current locale calls for a different tact for… a whole lot of reasons.

‘Not good enough, Yuy,’ I chide. ‘We made a lot of commitments to each other… together. You don’t get to make this decision all by yourself.’

There is an explosive sigh that comes across over the wind just fine, speaking to me of that exasperation I’d sensed earlier. I’m not quite sure what I think about the fact that he’d thought I’d just accept this whole deal with nothing but a smile and a nod.

When he doesn’t say anything, I can’t help but poke at it again. ‘I just… I just need to know why.’

I see him open his mouth, but then I see him close it again. I sigh, but I don’t think he can hear it. I couldn’t.

I turn my gaze out to follow his, but there’s really nothing much out there. Some lights in the distance and the lights of the stars coming out, but I don’t really think he’s looking at either one.

Never one to leave a silence untested, I try one more time. ‘Heero… please; what have I done wrong?’

It makes him turn to look at me and there’s a tension n his expression like the one he gets when he’s leaping to my defense. But then it turns to frustration when reality catches up to his instinct; there’s nobody here to take umbrage with except himself.

‘You haven’t…’ he begins and I can’t help it, I choke on the snort of a thing that wants to be a laugh.

‘Dear God,’ I blurt, ‘you’re not going to give me the it’s-not-you-it’s-me, speech! Seriously?’

He frowns darkly and just snaps his mouth shut, pretty much telling me that’s exactly the line he was about to use. Since I thwarted him on the delivery, he opts to not say anything at all, leaving me little choice but to carry on the conversation as though he said it. Or let it die, which ain’t gonna happen.

‘So you found somebody else?’ I ask, trying for gentle, but not quite able to keep the bitterness out of it.

‘No!’ he says, and there is so much vehemence in it that it makes me really wonder what in the hell we’re doing. Nothing has made a bit of sense since The Talk.

‘Then what?’ I press, hoping to use that spark of real emotion to get past the crap. ‘You just get tired of me? What?’

There is a sound that is part growl, part sigh, and part inarticulate… something. He drops his head back against the girder and, I swear, thumps it a couple of times.

‘Damn it, Duo,’ he finally says, ‘I’m trying to do the right thing here!’

Well that just tries really hard to make all kinds of things coalesce in my head that I don’t really want coal or esced and I snap back, as much to scatter thoughts as to answer him.

‘Right in whose God damn opinion?’

‘Mine!’ he says to the sky. ‘Yours! Everybody’s!’

I just… I don’t even know. I try for words, but his just aren’t making sense and I don’t have a clue. Just none. But he seems to be done and I figure we’ll spend the rest of the night sitting up here in the dark staring off at something beside each other if I can’t come up with something, so I finally just say it, because it’s the freaking truth.

‘You have completely and totally lost me.’

He kind of wants to laugh, because I see the corner of his mouth quirk up, but there’s somehow an hysterical quality to it, so he doesn’t, but it gives me some hope that maybe I’m getting somewhere. I make the conscious decision to wait him out this time, and I almost lose my resolve before he finally speaks again.

‘I would give you the world if I could,’ he tells me, and I can see he’s embarrassed as soon as he says it. Can see he hadn’t really meant to say it. So I know it for the truth it is, but it doesn’t exactly put any of the rest of it into any sort of perspective.

‘I don’t want the world,’ I reply. ‘I just want you.’

He rolls his head to the side and looks at me long and hard and it’s weirdly full of longing and regret; a jumble of emotions that I can’t make sense of. Maybe if we weren’t where we are, with the wind plucking at my clothes and my braid. Maybe I’d not be handling this whole thing so badly.

Or maybe I’d still be just as confused.

‘You deserve so much more,’ he says so softly that if the wind didn’t choose that moment to let up, I’d have never heard him.

‘What the hell is that suppose to mean?’ I demand, and he flinches, cementing my thought that he hadn’t really meant for me to hear it. But then he kind of frowns, some part of his temper flaring up, and I think maybe I’m finally going to start getting some answers.

‘I’m… damaged goods, damn it!’ he barks out and we just sit and stare at each other for a long, cold minute. I don’t speak, because in my humble opinion, that comment needs a little bit more detail.

He sighs and looks away first. If I want details, apparently, I’m going to have to dig for them.

‘No,’ I tell him, ‘you don’t get to deliver a line like that without explaining yourself. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Damaged goods? Where the hell did that come from? I didn’t even know he knew the term.

I shift ever so slightly so I’m more facing him, so I don’t have to keep looking sideways at him, and I will not talk about how hard it is to let go of the edge of the platform to do it.

He won’t meet my eyes, just goes back to leaning his head against the girder and staring up at the sky. We just listen to the wind blow for a while, but I wait, because that technique has gotten me more so far than the pushing.

‘I… I’m an emotional cripple,’ he suddenly says, and while I suppose it falls into the realm of detail, it’s a little light on sense, and really… where the fuck is he getting this crap?

I’ve pretty much gotten to see him run the gambit of emotions in the time I’ve known him… from the personal stuff in the bedroom, to that temper he has in the field. He’s not the type to wear it all out on his sleeve, I think for instance, that I’d been the only one in the room to realize just how close that trainee had come to getting his clock cleaned last month.

‘Heero, you are in no way emotionally crippled,’ I assure him, and his face does something all weird. I think there’s some part of him that is irritated with me for making us have this conversation, for making him say these things, but at the same time he kind of wants me to sort it all out.

I’ve always been Heero’s go-to guy for sorting out the sloppy parts of life that aren’t always black and white. I just wish I understood exactly what it is I’m sorting.

He’s not going to let this notion go that easy though, and he sighs another one of those sighs I can see but can’t hear. ‘I just… I can’t express my emotions the way you do,’ he says and I’m glad I turned to face him, because I’m not sure I’d have caught that if I hadn’t been watching him speak. ‘It’s like… like there’s a glass wall around what’s inside me… I don’t know how to get through it. I just… I can’t… I’m not…’

Whole lot of negatives there with no real idea attached to them. He never can quite figure out just what it is that he can’t, won’t, didn’t not whatever, and just peters out. He’s staring at the stars and I’m staring at him, mostly because I’m afraid of missing a key word or something that might make this whole thing make sense.

I tie this snippet of information together with the part where I deserve better, and then bundle it up with the ‘do the right thing’ part and it’s starting to look a whole hell of a lot like something I don’t much want to think about. So I drop the whole messy bigger picture and go back to the last comment.

‘You know, I’m not really a subtle kind of guy,’ I say, trying for a kind of casual tone, ‘but even I know when a man steps between me and two hundred pounds of slavering, rabid Rottweiler… he’s saying he loves me.’

It actually wins me a ghost of his tender smile for just a second, but whatever the hell is eating at him is going to take more than a couple of quips to ease away.

‘But it’s not fair to you that you have to wait for something like that to happen…’ he begins, and I snort.

‘That chocolate donut on my desk every Friday morning says it pretty loud too,’ I say, and can’t help smiling thinking about it. I still don’t know how he does it… we freaking live together, but there it is on my desk waiting for me every Friday when I get to work. You can only get them at one bakery and it’s on the other side of town. And he doesn’t even like donuts.

It pleases him, and I can see it for just a second before that feeling is swamped by the other one that we’ve been fighting all day. ‘It just…’ he begins, finally bringing his head down to look at me. ‘You just deserve somebody who can be as open as you are. Somebody who isn’t emotionally constipated.’

Emotionally… what? I just sit and stare at him for a long minute as something unpleasant starts to boil around in my head.

‘What the fuck was that?’ I ask, starting to get pissed, but needing to keep a lid on it because anger is not a thing that needs to come to this table. ‘That is about the third thing you’ve said today that… that didn’t even sound like you! Where is all this crap coming from?’

He kind of… flinches, in a purely internal way, and his eyes drop from mine and I’d swear to all the little impotent Gods out there, that he’s blushing. Something is mumbled that I just can’t freaking make sense of.

We sit for a couple of long minutes, both of us thinking our thoughts and I notice for the first time that the stars above us are thick and bright and pretty damn beautiful. It would be a gorgeous, utterly perfect night if we were sitting out there in the desert somewhere on the damn ground, wrapped up together and just star gazing. Instead of… whatever the hell it is we’re doing.

‘Ok, no,’ I say when I think I can be calm about the whole thing. ‘This is huge. You’re talking about ending our relationship and turning both our lives upside down and I need to know the whole story here.’

‘Duo,’ he says and when he says my name there is just so much sadness and so much longing and such utter regret in his voice that my boiling thoughts are pretty sure they’re on the right track. ‘I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking. I guess I’ve always known that I’m not quite like other people. What I went through when I was a child shaped me for life. I’m never going to be able to express myself… to be able to be as open and… and…’

His floundering around for words doesn’t seem to be finding any, so I jump in with a few of my own. ‘No… you are not quite like other people. I’m not either. We’re like a couple of big, fat snowflakes of utterly different. And you not being all run-of-the-mill is part of what I love. You express yourself just damn fine in all the ways that matter. Are you telling me you don’t love me?’

There is a hesitation that I can see is not because he doubts that part, but because he can kind of see how I’m about to skewer the basis of his argument. But he won’t lie about it and I finally get a little ‘No,’ that is just so full of so very much I can’t even catalog it.

‘No you are not, and you know what?’ I ask, though this one really is a rhetorical question so I don’t leave the pause to make him ask me what. ‘And I knew that. Even when you were standing in that stupid, tacky, indian themed motel room and telling me that we were over… I never doubted that love. You told me once that I’m your lode-stone when it comes to dealing with personal interaction, so I’m going to ask you now… who the hell has been filling your head with all this shit?’

He stares at me wide-eyed, and I finally see something fall away and he blurts, ‘Zechs,’ in a tone that is just begging me to take this and fix this and kiss it all better. But then he falters and his eyes drop. ‘And some of the others…’

And I’d bet all my stock in Winner Enterprises that I could name every last one of them.

It takes me two or three deep breaths before I can get past the litany of curse words that want to come out of my mouth and I manage, ‘All right, listen here… we have already established that you love me. The only other opinion that matters then, is mine. So let’s just forget this end of relationship business. Zechs Merquis is full of more shit than Trowa’s entire crew of elephants.’

He can’t quite let it go, dipping his head and looking down at his… lap? Hands? I’d look to see, but I’m kind of afraid of getting a glimpse of something else while I’m at it. ‘But you deserve so much more than I…’

I’m starting to get a little bit tired of that word to be honest, especially now that I can imagine the King of Splitends practically whispering it in Heero’s ear. ‘What I deserve is to have what I want. And what I want more than anything else in this world is you.’

‘But…’ he says, and it’s making me feel like I’m rooting around digging out a cancer. I wonder just how long Zechs has been working on him. How long this has been festering. ‘How do I know there isn’t somebody out there who can’t make you truly happy?’

If he were out of the way. And just who would this hypothetical person be? And who the fuck is implying that I’m not happy now?

I reach out and grab hold of his hand, not any tentative offer of comfort this time. Not a cautious touch that he can avoid. I grab hold of his hand and I squeeze it tight and I let him feel the cuts and the scrapes and the dried blood and I let him feel the damn shakes and I let him feel the tension and then I tell him.

‘I followed you up here because I love you. And I will follow you down because I will not be without you.’

And that’s as close as we’re going to come to talking about just what in the hell we’re doing damn near a thousand freaking feet in the freaking air on Christmas freaking eve to freaking start with.

He’s staring at me, eyes wide enough to finally let understanding leak into that stubborn brain of his and finally… finally my ridiculously self-sacrificing lover seems to actually be in there.

‘Duo?’ he asks, and there is a hint of horror in his tone, ‘how… how in the hell did you get up here?’

It is my turn to blink, so I do… several times. ‘How the hell do you think? The same damn way you did…’

‘No,’ he breathes, and I’d only thought his eyes were wide before. ‘No… there’s… there’s a ladder. In the main support. You only have to climb across from there…’

‘A ladder?’ I repeat, trying to get my head around that. No… he couldn’t be saying what I thought he was saying. ‘There’s a… ladder.’

He slips his arm around me then and the anchor is really nice when I start to laugh, because it gets hysterical pretty damn fast.

Though crap-damn if I know why having his arm around me helps me feel anchored, since there wasn’t a thing anchoring him any better than me. Guess that’s what you call faith, and I sure as hell wish I could just let him see what’s in my head, because all this talking is starting to wear me out.

Or maybe that was the climb.

When I can breathe again, I tell him, ‘I’m going to need you to tell me everything.’

‘Why would you want to hear all this shit?’ he mutters, but I have no real trouble hearing him with my head pressed against him.

‘First,’ I reply, ‘I’m going to need to be able to explain to Commander Une just why I have royally trounced her resident PR Poster Boy.’

He has to think about that for a bit, and that arm around my shoulders squeezes tight for a minute. I’m waiting for the argument, but he circumvents it for the moment. ‘And second?’

‘I know how guys like Zechs work, Heero,’ I tell him, though I kind of don’t want to. ‘They start with a tiny grain of truth and they build on it, and they twist it and they don’t stop until that grain turns into a boulder.’

He’s very quiet then, and I give him a little while to think about it, before I raise my head so I can see him again. He’s troubled and he’s embarrassed and he’s confused and he’s second guessing his every thought. I can see a whole lot of old conversations playing out behind his eyes.

‘Think about who we’re talking about,’ I say, and dare to brush my fingers over his cheek. ‘Zechs Merquise has been competing with you since the damn war. You have somehow become the yard stick he measures himself against.’

Measures against and has been coming up short against since the war too. Maybe the guy had just reached a point where it was easier to try to knock a few inches off the yard stick. If you can’t improve to meet the standard… nuke the standard. The fact that the yard stick, the competition, and the whole damn thing, was all in that lunatic’s head, was kind of beside the point.

Heero’s looking at me hard and I can already see where his mind is going, and it tells me this fight isn’t entirely over. I’ve got my work cut out undoing the damage that’s been done here. But first I have to understand it inside and out.

‘Truth wasn’t the right word,’ I assure him. ‘But he took something that was inside you… some doubt, some fear, and he fed it like you feed a fire bits and pieces of kindling until it catches.’

And that’s what I have to know. I have to find the seed that Zechs nurtured until it grew enough to lead us to where we are now. Zechs… and all his damn cronies, will get their comeuppance, but Heero’s peace of mind and well being come first.

After that? There will be a challenge in the gym and I will knock the Lightening Count on his ass. And then I will wait for him to get up and I will knock him on his ass again. Then I will wait for him to get up and I will knock him on his ass again. Until he stops getting up. Until I’ve liberally rubbed his nose in the fact that he can’t even stand up to the Preventer’s second best agent.

And then I will get in his face and make it plain that to earn the right to go head-to –head with the best… he has to go through the second best first.

By the time I am done with him, I will have that psychopathic obsession focused on me instead of Heero and just let that asshole try his fucked up mind games on Shinigami.

And by that time… I figure I’ll just about be warmed up.

‘Duo?’ Heero asks, and his voice is so hesitant that it just about breaks my heart, ‘I… I’m so sorry. It all seems so… so… ‘

Stupid? Overblown? Fucked up? Tragic? Horrifying? He never does decide, and I don’t know that now is the time anyway. With visions of cold-cocked morons dancing in my head, my hands are damn near steady.

‘Shhh,’ I tell him, and give him a peck of a kiss at the corner of the frown he’s wearing. ‘We’re going to talk this all out, but… I gotta tell you; here is not really the place, ok?’

He snorts and there is the spark of something in his eyes that tries to rise to the teasing, but doesn’t quite make it. He gives me a brush of a kiss in return and just nods his acceptance.

‘Hey,’ I tell him on a sudden thought, ‘Merry freaking Christmas.’

The laugh I get is… a little strained, so we just end up sitting there for a little while longer. Watching the stars, because even as dark as it is, I’ve not quite worked up the nerve to look down.

When he feels like he might have calmed enough for it, and while I still feel like I’m pissed enough for it, I say, ‘let’s get the hell out of here, Yuy.’

He gives me that huff of an affirmative and even he’s starting to sound weary. I let him show me the way, almost weak-kneed relieved that we won’t be going down the same way I came up. I still can’t quite believe it, until he shows me the access hatch.

Wish I’d known the damn ladder was actually inside the main support though. Inside as in… nine hundred and forty five freaking ladder rungs (I count every last one) inside a pitch black shaft about as big around as a coffin.

Sure as hell hope this doesn’t become a Christmas tradition…

 

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