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" Everywhere I Look "Written By: Presser
Disclaimer : I do not own Gundam Wing or its characters. This work of fiction is written and shared freely without any attempt to profit financially from it. Rating : R Pairings : 1x2 Warnings : Wistful romance, AU, after Endless Waltz, and departing quite a bit from canon direction Summary: Duo Maxwell is a young, upcoming artist with a hole in his heart. He hates himself for never confessing his love to Heero Yuy, a war-weary mecha pilot running from his past all the way to the Phobos Project—the first manned mission to Mars. Duo longs for the man he loves, but doesn’t know where he is. Can they find love in each other’s arms? And what of Heero’s mysterious collapse when he arrives on Earth to search for the one he loves?
"Everywhere I Look " Chapter 8 “Can’t see the space garbage from here, can you?” Heero was surprised by the unexpected intrusion almost as much as by the mirroring of his thoughts. He felt his seat shift as someone sat next to him, but it hardly disturbed his reverie. He quickly dismissed the information from consciousness, keeping his face toward the window. Now he turned his head quickly to see the speaker. Next to him was an older man in a charcoal-gray business suit, closely spaced pinstripes of a lighter shade in the wool blend indicating the wearer’s wealth and power. He was heavy but not obese. His thick gray hair looked as though it had once been closely cropped, but now it radiated out a couple of inches from his skull at all points, producing a soft silver sheen about his head. A neatly trimmed mustache and goatee was centered in his full, fleshy face. His white dress shirt was precisely pressed; above it was a brilliant emerald silk tie that shimmered in the ambient light of the monthly shuttle from Luna to Earth, this one bound for Florida in the southern United States. When Heero turned to see who had interrupted his musings, the man’s head was down. He was picking at the back of a pale hand bordered by a cufflinked sleeve in his lap. The man looked up and smiled, and Heero found himself staring into eyes the same shade of gray as the hair above, but translucent, with silver flecks that made them seem to glitter. His gaze was piercing; it unnerved Heero in spite of the smile below it. “N- no, you can’t,” Heero said. He rubbed his eyes. “Headache?” his seatmate said. Heero sighed. “A bit. It feels like my eyes are overinflated, if that makes sense.” The man’s smile lessened. He tilted his head to one shoulder as though studying Heero. “Try loosing your shoes.” Heero’s eyebrows shot up. “The human body is a complex system,” the man said. “Relieve the pressure in one part and it will help another normalize.” Heero lowered one eyebrow. The older man raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly. Heero bent to untie his shoes. When he straightened, his companion’s expression was overly bright, as though he was eager to see Heero’s reaction to bending over. It perturbed him. The man inhaled and exhaled as though satisfied with his observation of the young man sitting with him. He shifted in his seat. “I’ve taken this shuttle at least a dozen times, and each time I marvel at three things.” The man paused. Heero continued to gaze into his eyes. “First, there’s the difference in takeoff. From Luna there’s no external noise since there’s no atmosphere; and with one-sixth the gravity of Earth, the vibration is minimal because the thrust required is so much less. Second, the landing is just the reverse. Touching down on Luna is like guiding a child’s balloon filled with plain air to keep it from bumping the floor too hard, but a landing on Earth is preceded by a long, fiery descent, like being shot from a cannon straight into hell, then hitting the ocean so hard you can see the splash from the ISS.” Heero glanced away as he thought about the International Space Station, still in orbit and maintained by a small consortium of nations, mostly as a historic artifact. No science was done there any longer. When he realized that his seatmate had stopped talking, he looked back at him. The man’s smile seemed too big, as though he relished a private joke hidden in what he had said. “You want to hear the third?” “What? Yes.”
Heero had been surrounded by people since his arrival on Luna ten days before. First he was sequestered for the prerequisite physical and psychological exams, followed by a series of intense debriefing sessions. At the end of a grueling three days every bit as taxing as his busiest moments aboard the Beta I, the officer in charge told Heero that he was contemplating another trek through the entire process. “Using different metrics this time,” he explained. Heero was spared this by the appearance of Howard, his old war buddy and Senior Flight Controller for Luna base. On the morning of the fourth day, Howard barged into a conference room where Heero sat at a long, polished table facing three military scientists taking notes on DocPads. Wearing his dress uniform decked out with every ribbon, badge, and honor he had ever been awarded, he strode confidently through the door, put his hand around Heero’s upper arm, and stood him up. As he whispered in Heero’s ear, all three scientists raised loud objections, one threatening to call security. Heero smiled as Howard turned to the outraged trio and quieted each with a riveting, imperious stare. Then he spoke in a commanding voice. “As of this moment the debriefing and examination of Heero Yuy has officially ended.” The examiners sat in stunned silence. But as soon as Howard moved to lead Heero from the room, loud threats and accusations burst again from all three. Without another word, Howard walked Heero twenty paces to the door and through it, then closed it firmly. With a most sober expression he turned his steely gaze on Heero and said in his thin, reedy voice, “Sometimes you just gotta tell ‘em to go to hell. Now let’s move before they call security.”
“Now this is much better,” Howard said. He took a big swallow of his mai tai and grinned like a cat licking at a bright yellow feather in the corner of its mouth. He was out of formal dress and back in his regular attire: Bermuda shorts and a loud floral-print shirt with the tail out. Heero raised his wine glass to the light in The Cavern, Luna base’s most exclusive restaurant, and admired the deep cherry glow. He brought it to his lips and sipped. After more than half a year of ship’s rations, the taste was exquisite. “I agree completely,” Heero said. “Damn right,” Howard said. Heero smiled. “I certainly appreciate what you did, Howard, but I have to tell you I almost fell out of my chair when you walked in wearing a uniform.” Howard grinned broadly. “That’s why it worked, I think. As Senior Flight Controller, I have rank—not all that high, but I can pull it when I need to. Of course, I run things tight in my department, but I let everyone dress civilian casual, mostly so I can. Plus it helps with morale. I haven’t worn my dress uniform since—well hell, I may not have ever worn it, come to think about it. Anyway, that was part of my plan. Your inquisitors never knew what hit them. All they saw was a high-ranking officer they didn’t recognize. I counted on that flummoxing them long enough for me to hustle you out of there before they figured out I didn’t have the authority.” Howard looked at Heero over the top of his glasses as he pulled on his drink. As he lowered it to the table, he smacked his lips and said, “Damn the historic falderal of your mission and all that. You’re human, you know; a grown man, not a lab rat. You need to breathe.”
Heero enjoyed catching up on things with Howard, but the rest of his stay at Luna base was stressful. His workmates on the Phobos mission learned early on that he was a taciturn man and gave him his space in the social order. Only Joy, his right hand on most assignments, had broken through his barriers to become a friend. But on Luna he was irritated by the constant attention paid to him, not because he disliked people, but for what seemed to others a trivial reason: interruptions. It was anything but trivial to Heero, who prized his privacy and liked to think before he spoke. His way of conversing was diametrically opposed to the media demands of zero space between their questions and responses expected to be full of witty, captivating sound bites crafted to captivate the current news cycle. The idea that he was a hero confused him even more than it did at the end of the war. This time he hadn’t rescued anyone, hadn’t disabled a bomb or an foiled an attack. In his mind, he had simply done his duty, had completed the job given him. More than this, he found the way people justified their intrusions into his private life distressing. He could not suss the idea that because he was a public figure he had given up any right to a private life. He spent a great deal of mental energy on sifting through whether he owed the public anything and whether he would be able to remain open to genuine opportunities or offers of friendship in the sea of calculating supplicants that lapped at his heels regardless of what he did. By the end of his ten days on Luna he was constantly on edge, the tension even permeating his sleep. Once he signed release papers and boarded the shuttle for Earth, he felt that he could at last relax. But no. A complete stranger had taken the seat next to him and was interrupting his train of thought with constant jabbering. The man seemed to be more than a businessman: his clothes were tailored, the material obviously expensive; an air of authority seemed to underlay his polite demeanor; and Heero couldn’t place him in the social hierarchy. He was grateful that his fellow traveler seemed not to recognize him. But something in his eyes was discomforting.
“You want to hear the third?” “What? Yes.” Heero’s thoughts had drifted so far from the present moment that he could not recall his seatmate’s topic or his first two points. He rubbed his eyes again. *Why am I so damn tired? I feel like I could sleep for a week.” He narrowed his eyes and focused on the older man, determined to stay with the conversation. “It’s the beauty of the Earth from here.” Heero followed the man’s fleshy index finger to the view through the window. “I mean from exactly this point. We’ve just lifted off from Luna, so we’re not so close to Earth that the space garbage ringing it is visible. Unless,” he added, “you know what to look for and have better than twenty-twenty vision.” Heero felt a sudden chill on the back of his neck. He turned his head quickly to see the man smiling. His silver-gray eyes glittered. Nothing was out of place in his expression or demeanor, yet—Are those contact lenses? The man withdrew his finger. He scratched idly at his temple, then put his hand in his lap. Heero watched as the man encircled the wrist of his other hand, lifted it, and adjusted its position across his knees. All at once he realized that it was a prosthetic. Once the thought came to him, he easily saw that the flesh-tone coloring was too uniform to be natural. The lack of texture and of body hair across the back and knuckles was suddenly obvious. He jerked his head up and again found his companion looking directly at him. He met Heero’s stare with a smile. He released his artificial hand and brought the other to his neck to adjust the knot of his silk tie, the deep green gleam once again drawing Heero’s attention. What am I missing? What is it that’s not— “Once you’re close enough to see the debris of abandoned satellites, jettisoned experiments, broken equipment—things like that—it’s no longer possible to see the Earth as a single thing, to see it as the Earth—” “Sphere United Nation,” Heero said, surprised at how close the man’s train of thought was to his own ruminations on the same topic many times aboard the Beta I, and how easily he finished the man’s sentence. “Precisely,” he said and smiled again, showing teeth for the first time. Heero’s breath caught in his throat. A gleam of gold at the corner of the man’s mouth sent a chill recognition skittering down his spine. With eyes quite wide he whispered, “Dr. J?” His companion’s grin grew. “You always were the best of the pack.”
Heero’s conversation with his former tutor lasted deep into the night cycle of the first day of the trip to Earth. They discussed many things, from the old scientist’s views on the Phobos mission to the whirlpool of current Earth Sphere politics. Janus Sarin—he insisted from the instant Heero recognized him that he be referred to only by his family name, and with the honorific mister, not doctor—“strictly for my personal safety,” he said—responded willingly to every question Heero asked. And Heero was full of them: Questions about Gundam mechanics that had puzzled him for years; the rationale for the design constraints of the mecha guidance system; Sarin’s personal reasons for deciding to participate in Operation Meteor—all these the scientist answered to Heero’s satisfaction. Sarin had his own questions, which Heero answered in kind in spite of their personal nature: What prompted you to volunteer for the Phobos trip? Why return now? What draws you to Earth? The last question Heero answered only in part and was deliberately vague. He didn’t want to know what Sarin thought of his newly discovered sexual orientation or his attraction to Duo Maxwell, his fellow soldier and companion from the war; he hardly knew what he thought of these things himself, and didn’t want the opinions of the authority figure who had literally engineered his personality and worldview clouding his ability to think clearly about such things. The irony Heero hoped Sarin couldn’t see was that the training he endured under the scientist enabled him to control his reactions to the rising panic triggered by his decision to be less than straightforward with him. Sarin demanded complete obedience and trust from Heero from the first day they met. He tolerated no secrets, no hiding. Now Heero faced the man who once held total control of his mind and body for most of his life, a man who never hesitated to use his power over him to instruct, train, reward, and punish as he saw fit—faced him and answered what seemed like simple questions without allowing facial tics to show or a quaver to modulate his tone of voice. Nevertheless, there was a breathlessness underneath the cordiality and respect Heero showed to Mr. Sarin—a name that would forever feel odd on his lips—or perhaps it was an urgency to breathe, as though with each inhalation his lungs were not certain another breath would follow. Though the volume of questions Heero wanted to ask seemed to double with each answer he received, there were many he didn’t ask. Most of them began with Why, and Heero somehow found the strength to leave them unspoken, refusing even to finish them in his mind. Instead he parried his former trainer’s overly polite inquiries about his personal life with queries about his prosthetic. “This?” Sarin said, once again lifting his artificial hand with thumb and forefinger and dropping it back to his lap. “I hate it. I was famous during the war—or infamous, I should say. Remember? But no one knew what I looked like at first, and I did everything I could to keep it that way. And I would have succeeded if I hadn’t decided to make that grandstand move to stop Lady Une from blowing up the colonies. That Kushrenada fellow was quite sharp. I think he knew letting Une operate as a loose cannon would force my hand faster than anything else he could have done.” “But your hand,” Heero said, pointing at Sarin’s prosthetic. “Yes, my hand,” Sarin said, grinning into Heero’s eyes. “I don’t regret stopping Une, not for an instant. But one of the stupidest things I ever did was to brandish my titanium claw on a live system-wide broadcast. Made me instantly recognizable by every person in the Earth Sphere. So,” he said, pointing at his artificial hand with a big sigh, “I’m now stuck with this. Oh, it’s state-of-the-art, all the latest bells and whistles. But it buzzes when I wiggle the fingers the slightest bit, you know? And it’s so limited. Heero’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, yes,” Sarin said. “The way I was, I had the best of both worlds. I still type with just one hand, you know? Because this thing”—he scowled into his lap—“is useless at a computer. Did you know they still haven’t figured out how to make artificial skin work with touch screens?” He paused. “I can type eighty words a minute with one hand, you know. Put myself through the same kind of training I did with you.” He looked up without moving his head and winked at Heero over a crooked grin. Heero shivered at the gleam in Sarin’s silvery eyes.
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