|
" Better Than Fine "Written By: Presser DISCLAIMER: This fanfiction is not written for profit. The author claims no ownership of the characters. Pairing: 1x2 Rating: PG Spoilers: The story refers to the final events of the series. Warnings: Post-series AU, light romance Summary: What do you do with a broken heart that never found the courage to say "I love you?"
Duo struggles to find the courage to confess to Heero, but before he can, Heero vanishes, leaving only a cryptic note that explains nothing. Weeks later, Duo finds a letter taped to his shower curtain. Who broke into his apartment to leave it? Why? Does this have anything to do with Heero's disappearance?
Better Than Fine answers these questions with
a surprise twist that will leave your pulse racing and warm your heart. "Better Than Fine " 7 Heero told his story, his account thorough and well thought out, and his quiet, steady delivery betraying none of the emotions roiling inside him. Duo listened intently, never looking away, never interrupting -- something none of the other pilots had ever known him to do. When Heero finished, a thick silence filled the room. Quatre quietly took Trowa's hand, and Wufei shifted imperceptibly in his seat on the floor as Heero waited for Duo to speak. At last, Duo calmly said, "Okay, Heero, let me get this straight. The short version is Preventers made a show of disbanding, but that was a ruse, a maneuver designed to throw off an underground cell of former Oz soldiers planning a terrorist campaign. Relena persuaded the government that remaking Preventers into an organization based on a different strategy would give them a better shot at disabling them." Heero nodded. "And you've been working with..." Duo glanced at Wufei, who also nodded. "How long?" Duo asked. Heero swallowed but kept his gaze steady. This is it. "I've been a Preventer since the organization was formed by the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. After ESUN recruited --" Duo's eyes grew wide. "So our entire time together..." he said, "you've been living a lie." His matter-of-fact tone stung Heero more than if he had shouted in anger. Duo saw only the faintest change in his eyes, but it was enough to reveal how much he had hurt him. "No, Duo, no," Heero said, "not a lie. It's --" "You told me you were done with the war," Duo continued in a flat voice, "tired of missions, fed up with plotting and intrigue and stealth. You said you wanted to finally live the life you hoped for before the war happened; the life Dr. J stole from you." Duo's eyes were moist as he whispered, "The life you said you wanted with me." "Keeping a secret isn't the same as a lie, Duo," Heero said. "Remember your birthday last year? How I had to work late" -- Heero made air quotes around the words --"several days before? How you got so worried I was growing cold to you that you --" Heero faltered, and Quatre interjected, "That you confessed that to me?" Duo seemed surprised that he and Heero weren't alone. "A surprise birthday party," he said, "isn't the same as leading a double life for six years, Heero." The look in Heero's eyes changed, but Duo pressed on. "Tell me why. You must have had a pretty good reason." "I did." Heero had dreaded this moment. He knew it would come eventually, and he had spent as much time preparing for it as he had for any mission. But now that it was here, it was much harder than he'd ever imagined it could be. As he marshaled his thoughts, Wufei spoke. "Why don't you start with the real purpose of Preventers?" Heero was grateful for Wufei's prompt. "Everyone here knows the stated reason for forming Preventers. ESUN wanted a crack team to prevent conflicts from escalating." "That's what we told the public, anyway," Quatre said, and Trowa squeezed his hand firmly. Duo raised his eyebrows. "You're in on it too?" "Just PR," Quatre said, pulling his hand free. "I was fed up with the military thing -- we all were, weren't we? -- but I still wanted to help. And if there's one thing I'm good at, it's being a public figure, so I kinda slipped Preventers's public raison d'être into a few speeches and conversations with key figures. It didn't take much." Quatre smiled sheepishly. "People assume because I'm rich I know what I'm talking about." "You?" Duo said to Trowa. "Strictly advisory," Trowa said. "During the war, my talent was engineering big disruptions. I may have stumbled into the circus because I was a troubled soul who'd lost his bearings, but it didn't take long for me to find myself. And when I did, I used my circumstances to maximum effect to kick Oz off its balance." Wufei didn't bother to comment. He had made no effort to hide his reasons for joining Preventers. "Are you saying," Duo said to Heero, "that Preventers wasn't formed to keep conflict from escalating?" "It was," Heero said, "but it was more than that. The night Relena pitched the idea of a multi-stage mission, we talked almost till daybreak. Eventually we all accepted her premise that even though quashing unrest before it can grow is important, it's like picking withered petals off a diseased rose bush. We needed more than that to get at the root of the problem." "So how does publicly disbanding and reforming underground do that? You still haven't told me what you're actually doing." "The underlying problem," Heero said carefully, "is the feelings that make people want to disrupt the system." He waited for Duo to process that. "Okay," Duo said slowly. "So how do you change how a person feels? You can't force them. You can't just tell them they shouldn't feel the way they do. If they think they're being treated unfairly, then --" "That's why," Wufei said, "Relena and the four of us --" His sentence died under Duo's harsh glare. "The four of us?" Duo said bitterly. "Really? The four of us?" "Duo..." Heero said, "don't think we --" "Don't think what?" Duo said, raising his voice. "Don't think you didn't want me? That I wasn't up to the job? That I couldn't handle it?" "Nothing's further from the truth," Wufei said. "We're all professionals here, and we're all talented, especially you." "But?" Duo said, color rising in his cheeks. "Go ahead, Mr. Honor and Justice. When have you ever sugarcoated the truth?" Wufei looked away. "No one's better than you at getting out of impossible situations, Duo," Trowa said patiently. "Everyone knows that." Quatre nodded but studied a button on his vest as he fiddled with it. Duo glared at each man in turn, but no one met his eyes. "Will someone tell me whatever the fuck you think the truth is?" "You're a loose cannon," Heero said finally. "You get out of impossible situations by doing the unexpected, running straight at the enemy without a plan. A long time ago you told me, 'Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff and figure out how to grow wings on the way down.'" Duo remembered all too well when he'd said that. He'd broken Heero out of a medical lab in an Oz facility. He blew a hole in the wall with a grenade, and he and Heero had jumped from a window dozens of stories above ground. Duo coasted down with the help of a handheld rotor. He'd given Heero a parachute, but incredibly, he refused to deploy it until Duo's screams brought him to his senses at the last possible moment. Duo watched him hit the ground hard, rolling, tumbling, completely out of control. When he landed, he rushed to Heero, so battered he couldn't stand on his own. As Duo helped him up, Heero asked why he'd done what he'd done. "Even an idiot like me can see you're important to Operation Meteor," Duo had said. "So somebody had to do something, didn't they?" "You did this without orders?" Heero said with wide eyes. Duo answered with a proud and cocky smile. "Without thinking about the consequences?" Heero added. That's when Duo had told him that sometimes action without thinking through a plan was necessary. "So?" Duo said in the quiet back room of a little shop in the rough part of town. "It gets the job done, doesn't it? Probably got some jobs done that never would have succeeded any other way. So tell me," he said, his voice hardened by sarcasm, "how's that a liability instead of an asset?" Heero leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together. Duo mirrored him. "What did I just say the real problem is?" Heero said. "And the real goal, the real purpose, of Preventers?" "You said," Duo said deliberately, "the root of all the unrest is people's feelings, that you need to change those or nothing else will change." "Yeah," Heero said, "that's what I said." Duo thought about that until only one conclusion remained. "You're saying... that this is... that it needs a more delicate touch than I've got." In that moment Heero was prouder of Duo than he'd ever been. It takes courage to see that sometimes your strengths can be liabilities, and more courage than that to admit it to your friends, much less to yourself. In the silence Duo searched Heero's face, hoping for a glimmer of emotion he knew he wouldn't find. Finally he said, "I get it." His voice was cold but not harsh. "I really do get it, you know. You don't need a firebrand when your mission is persuading people." It took all his strength to keep from looking away. Heero knew only one way to deal with problems of a human nature: He explained his way out of them. Duo gritted his teeth and waited for him to do just that. But what Heero said next dumbfounded him. "But we do need you, Duo. I need
you." |
