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"Put it Down"Written By: Dragonmistress_7 Disclaimer: I don't own the Gundam Wing Boys.
Put It Down When all the fighting finally stopped, I tried to keep track of them, as best I could. Sometimes it was easier than others, and a few times, I lost them all together, but I always got them back eventually. Wufei was the easiest to keep tabs on. I'm not saying he had the easiest time of it, but he certainly had the most stable life, and, ironically, the shortest. He joined Preventers, and did a hell of a job, from what I heard. He was always the top agent. Privately, he suffered. From guilt, depression, boredom, just about anything you can suffer from. As far as I can tell, he'd wanted Treize to kill him, instead of the other way around, but he felt he'd even messed that up. Then one day, only a few months after he took the job, he came between a bullet and a civilian. Someone said that he smiled and then put his gun down like it bit him. I always wondered why he put it down. They set up a memorial in a Preventers-owned cemetery. I say memorial because, despite what they think, the ground beneath that gravestone is empty. Duo was hardest to follow. When the Endless Waltz ended, he sank back into the mire he had emerged from. After all we had been through, you'd think that he would aspire to something greater than the streets of L2, but every time he was spotted, he was still living life on the streets, getting into trouble, coming onto anything that moved just to be able to eat. He was still Duo, though. After a particularly trying period of searching for him, I got, of all things, a postcard. Don't ask me how he got it to me, but I found it on my doorstep one morning. It was a hand-drawn picture of some nasty little hole on L2 with rats running around it. At the top, it said, "Greetings from Hell." When I flipped it over, the back just said, "I still got it, huh?" He showed up again shortly afterward. The last I heard before he disappeared for the longest stretch, he was just another cheap whore who acted weird. No big deal, right? When he turned up again, he was just another dead whore who should have gotten a pimp to protect him. Though really, lasting one year and nine months where he was meant that, for L2, he'd lived a pretty long life. He disappeared again, once more, after that, but, predictably, nobody got too excited over it. I think Heero looked up a listing of the most dangerous jobs and just picked the one at the top of the list. He became a rescue worker for disintegrating colonies. As colonies fall into disrepair and begin to literally break up beneath the feet of their inhabitants, rescue workers evacuate the citizens. He defied the odds for three years, and I think he finally got tired of waiting on fate. Heero had just successfully gotten an entire apartment building full of people to safety and gone back to check that everyone was out when the whole block decided to take a ride through space. It was a tragic "accident" that could have been avoided if Heero had simply asked the building superintendent if everyone was there. He didn't, though, because he didn't want to. Officially, government administrators felt that it was
worth the effort to recover the body and have it placed in a grave
with a gaudy headstone proclaiming him a brave, good man. Unofficially,
I spent quite a bit of money having his body retrieved. It was when he was fired from the circus that I went to see him. I'll never forget the look on his face when I told him those things were going to drive him out of his mind. He looked more pleased than I had ever seen him as he said, "That's the idea." It was a long time before he added, "It's a shit of a place to be, anyway," After that, he began dealing drugs to support his own habit. I learned a very important lesson from watching him. A downward spiral can go down a LONG way. It took Trowa five years to finally be driven permanently from his mind. He overdosed and fell in the middle of his crystal meth lab. Not a dignified way to die, but a death nonetheless. That's our little secret, though, because Trowa Barton is on a missing persons list. The same "buddy" who had been following Trowa around before found the body first. After Trowa "disappeared" and was presumed dead, all eyes turned to me, the last remaining Gundam pilot. A few years passed, and nothing happened. I was a wealthy, successful businessman and politician, well-liked, reasonably handsome, and, above all, alive. Somewhere in the crowd, a whisper began, and it said, "He's the Lucky One." These days, it's very easy to keep track of my friends. I can tell you where they are within a few inches at any given time. They are here, in unmarked graves, beneath the tree that I am sitting under at this very moment. They are in my memory and in my heart and they will be with me always. I lean my head back against the trunk and wonder how much longer until I am with them, as well. Not long, now. My health has been poor for a long time, since before Heero died, and it has only gotten worse lately. I don't mind so much, though. Everything is exactly like I wanted it. Memorials have been erected for each of my friends, many memorials, actually, scattered through the colonies and all over the Earth. It makes it harder for anyone to find out that they are all empty. Soon, my name will join theirs in dozens of prominent monuments and anonymous graveyards. Four of my most trusted followers know the secret of this tree, and they have been instructed to pass it to future generations. I know that eventually the knowledge will die, but by that time, I don't think it will be even remotely close to important anymore. I cough into my hand, and it comes away red, but it has been doing that for some time now, and that is nothing to concern myself with. I wipe it away with a handkerchief. My mind wanders to the tree, and my final resting place beneath it. I imagine what will happen above the five of us as we lie in silence. Children will play here, climbing this tree, laughing, and shouting, and then falling from it and breaking their arms. Lovers will get carried away in its protective shade, away from the prying eyes of their disapproving parents. Good and bad, laughter and tears, a hundred memories that will be someone else's, but they make me smile. I don't mind, and I know the others won't, either. Those things are Living, you know, the thing that everybody takes for granted, and that was all we ever wanted for others. Others, mind you, not ourselves. We didn't belong here, in this quiet, peaceful world we created. Perhaps it is a rule that if you create something, it is not yours to enjoy. That may be why deities don't walk among us. I give a slow, small grin. I guess that means I'm the most stubborn, not the luckiest. Now, suddenly, I understand. They all got the violent ends they expected, and Wufei even got the honorable death he wanted, but me, I've been holding on for so long now, and my end will be a quieter type of violence, the violence of my body's rejection of the life inside it. "You understood. You were the Lucky Ones," I tell them. "I was too scared to admit that this wasn't mine, and never would be. All that made me was confused." I cough again, this time into the handkerchief, and the blood pours forth from my mouth. When I finally stop, my nose is still bleeding. "By the time I understood, the decision had been made for me. It was such a relief to know that I was going die. I know that doctor thought I was crazy, but he didn't understand. Nobody understood, because you were all gone by that time." "Silly Quatre," says Duo from his perch in the branches of the tree. He looks young and healthy and smiling, not at all like the last time I saw him, skin pale in death and wrinkled with premature age. "You think we understood? We were just landing wherever we fell and staying there. It took us time to get the picture, too." "Some more time than others," Wufei adds, a bit smugly before spreading himself out in the sunshine. "It's not something that's easy to accept," Heero says, and the light behind his face makes him seem almost like a different person. "But it's all so much better once you do," Trowa says quietly from beside me. Of all the changes, his are the most dramatic. The skin that was sallow and the dark circles around his eyes are gone, nothing more than memories from a bad dream. He takes the handkerchief from me with a smile. "You don't need that anymore. I'm sorry it was so hard for you to let go." "Let go?" I ask. "I'm ready to let go now. Put that thing down, Trowa." My words remind me of a question and I look to Wufei. "Hey, tell me something. Why did you put it down?" Somehow, he knows what I mean. "The same reason you did. For that matter, same reason we all did. I didn't need it anymore." Trowa's smile widens as he drops the bloody handkerchief, placing it next to a pale hand I don't quite recognize. I look down at a thin frail-looking blonde man in his mid-twenties leaning against the tree, a bit of blood on his lips. "Is he okay?" I ask uncertainly. "His friends are coming to help him," Heero points out. Four Arabic men, who are, inexplicably, crying, make their way to the tree. "Well, okay then," I concede. "So where are we going?" "To a place where there is a peace that we did not create," Wufei says, coming again to his feet. "And we're allowed to be happy and fit in there?" I ask. Duo jumps from the tree. "Oh, sure. It'll be great, not at all like that last place." "But, Duo, I don't remember, why was the last place so bad?" We all look at each other, and it's easy to see that they don't remember, either. "I think," Trowa says slowly, "that it had something to do with pain." I nod, accepting this as answer enough. "And pink," Heero adds suddenly. "I distinctly
remember disliking something pink,"
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