It's one of those dreams again.
Even while inside it, I realise it, yet I remain powerless to break out of it or change the outcome.
It starts out beautiful, as it always does. Trowa lies prone beneath me, lips bruised with kisses, his deep, intoxicating eyes half-lidded in breathless bliss. His skin is flushed and warm, and soft as velvet over steel, his body firm and strong as he arcs against me. Heady with his moans, I bend to kiss him-my lips stray hungry across his cheek, down the line of his jaw and the hollow of his neck.
My chest touches his, and the rapid beat of his heart pounds against my skin. My own heart answers, throbbing in synchronised time with his, and I wonder for the thousandth time if we are really but one being, and this casing of flesh that separates us is really nothing but a formality after all.
He pulls me upward as my tongue caresses his throat; he nibbles at my ear and I moan, because I have never felt anything so spectacular as his mouth on my skin...even if I have only ever felt it in my dreams.
"Heero...." he whispers breathlessly.
And I shatter.
"NO!" I pull away, seize his shoulders and shove him roughly to the floor. "It's me! It's Quatre! Don't you see me? Don't you ever see me? Trowa, it's Quatre, Quatre Quatre Quatre--!"
"Quatre...." He repeats my name, and I should thrill to hear him speak it, but for the absence of any recognition in his voice. He doesn't see me, doesn't know me. I roll off him, curl around myself with my back to him so he can't see my face. I know I am crying. I don't want him to see.
"Quatre..." he repeats. My name swirls on his tongue like new wine and he savours it, tastes it-but like wine, he is trying only to place what he does not recognise in his head. He sounds sad, sorry to have hurt me. He should know I deserve this from him, but he doesn't. He touches my shoulder, tenderly, as if he would pull me back.
"Stop."
He pauses, confused-I can sense it, though he doesn't say as much. And there we remain, frozen in my formless dream like a half-finished sculpture, terrified to move.
He does, at last. He presses a kiss to my shoulder. "Quatre." Apologetic, accepting. He is sorry to have hurt me. He may not know me, but he will love me anyway.
It is too much for me to bear.
He turns me, kisses me, and I feel hysteria rise in my throat. It bursts from my lips and I scream, flailing, pushing him backward. "NO! STOP!" He falls back, his eyes wide with confusion and fear. I want to catch him, hold him, tell him I'm sorry, beg for forgiveness, plead with him to know me, love me.
I want him to disappear.
"DON'T! DON'T TOUCH ME!!"
I must have screamed it aloud again, because someone is shaking me, but Trowa is still staring at me from the floor. He begins to fade, and the dream with him, and an entirely different voice, a woman's voice, is calling my name. She knows me. She is tired, and sad; her voice is foggy with sleep and despair, but these are things I understand. I listen. I follow.
"Quatre, wake up." Noin is shaking me, but when she sees me blink at her, forcing the last of the dream away, she gathers me into her arms as if I were a child who needed comforting. I'm not, but I like the illusion. I pretend for a moment that I am a child, because I never was, and that she is my mother, because I never had one.
I hear her send a servant to find Heero. I am sorry that I have woken everyone up, and I try to tell her so. I fumble and stutter, but she understands. (My mother would understand.) "It's all right, Quatre, it's just a dream."
"I'm sorry."
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
I wonder about that. Do I? Would it help purge this pain to share it?
I know better. This will never go away, and I will not burden her with it. I shake my head.
She nods, and squeezes me. She understands. She has nightmares too. She told me, after the first night when I woke her up like this. She dreams about her students dying in their beds at Lake Victoria. It haunts her the way Trowa haunts me.
Heero appears then, and Miss Noin touches my cheek and goes back to her bed. She can't do anything for me. She hopes Heero can. She doesn't know how worn down we both are, and by unspoken agreement, we do not tell her.
"Dreaming again." It is not a question. Heero sits down next to me on the bed. It sinks a little under our combined weight. His eyes are hollow. I never noticed it before, but I can feel it now, all the life leaking out of him, leaving him thin and brittle, like old paper. He puts his arm around me, awkwardly, and I am amased at how light he feels inside. He's so close to breaking...it's my fault, of course. I am selfish. I took everything from him, I'm draining him.
I turn his face toward me, my fingers cupping his chin, and lean close. I kiss him, tenderly, on the lips. He is not enthusiastic, but he doesn't protest either, he kisses me back a little. A question, though, in the salt of his mouth-why?
"You should leave here," I whisper.
His eyes go hard, for a breath or two, but he doesn't have the fire now to maintain it. "I can't, Quatre-Trowa-"
"We'll keep looking without you." I know what he does with Relena to keep her happy, keep her supporting us. I wish he wouldn't. Relena would help us without his pretending to love her, and it's killing him. Pretending this, for my sake, is killing him. "We'll find a way for you to go. You're fading."
He nods once, curtly. He didn't think I noticed. He didn't want me to. But I can feel him. I wonder if there are any other two people on earth who are as close as we are in this strange way. We love each other, we hate each other, but we have no-one else to depend on. We are bound to each other, and though it hurts us, we cannot bring ourselves to break away.
"Will you be all right?" he asks.
I try to smile. He knows I won't. "There's nothing else you can do."
He nods again, rises, kisses me once. Intimacy without affection. "Then good night." It is a formality. Neither of us has good nights anymore, but we cannot keep from wishing.
He departs, and I am alone again, and afraid to sleep. I cannot face my dream-Trowa, who does not know me but tries to love me anyway. I'm cold, but even my nightclothes are too heavy. I take them off.
I stretch out on my back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. On the other side of the ceiling is the sky. Somewhere in the sky...Trowa.
I expand. My heart grows, swelling, stretching outward toward that sky. I'm looking for him. I could always feel him before-from the moment I met him, I could feel him, like a spark at the edge of my soul that flickered and dimmed sometimes but was always there. And after a while it was less a spark, and more of a simple lack of emptiness, as if I had become whole because of him, and he was a part of me. That was why I didn't believe he was dead. I would have known. That part of me would have gone out, and left a hole in me. But time passes, and we find nothing. Despair darkens the edges of my soul.
I envelope the sky. There are so many people there, so many hearts and souls and hopes and fears and loves and nightmares that it hurts to feel them. I can bear it, for Trowa. If it pierces a thousand holes in my soul, it will be worth it to find him. I am the universe, the heart of the universe, and I am looking for my Trowa.
But the universe is empty.
He is gone.
Could I have killed him after all?
The thought is too harsh for crying. There are not tears enough to wash the guilt from me. I crawl to the edge of the bed, hunched over with my head on my knees. I'm crying anyway. It's not good enough, but I'm crying.
The violin is at the foot of the bed. I had forgotten it. Noin found it for me, when she found out I played it. It's ancient, it hasn't been taken care of properly, the neck is warped and the strings are all but dead. So I thanked her for it and set it aside.
But I need something more, now, so I pick it up.
I tune it, though I don't want to, because Trowa deserves a song in tune. He deserves so much more-there is no song in the world deep enough to give voice to this pain, but I have nothing else to offer. I lift the violin to my chin; there is no chinrest and it hurts. Good. It should hurt.
Mournful and empty it begins-like me. Slow legato phrases soar keening to the sky like the wind that first shaped the world, winding into the darkness and fading away far too soon for the one they are meant for to hear.
Faster, then, and more desperate. Sweet harmonies that border on discord and a bow that flies across the old strings because there is too much sorrow spilling out of me, and I must move fast enough to catch it all in the notes before it floats away. I play until my shoulders aches, til my hand cramps and my fingers bleed. And still I play on, because I am too afraid to let the song end.
The violin is old. The e-string snaps, and the broken end lashes across my cheek. The song is over. I think I am bleeding.
I don't mean to let the violin drop so hard to the floor, but my hand is stiff, and I can't unbend my fingers properly to set it down. I hope it will forgive me. It has already punished me. Gingerly I press my palm to my cheek. It comes away wet, smeared with blood.
I sink down onto the floor. The wooden part is rough with too many splinters. The carpet is rough too, and stings my skin. My head falls back against the foot of the bed. I'm tired.
I'll sleep here, on the floor. I shouldn't be comfortable. I don't deserve a soft mattress and warm blankets.
My father was right after all. What good can one little boy do to change the world?
I wanted to show him I never was a little boy. I killed him. I killed so many people. All because I couldn't prove I was right. I killed Trowa. I'm killing Heero now.
Enlightenment. Anagnorisis.
I will not leave this war alive.
I'll make up for it. For everything I've done. Somehow, I'll make it better, and then I can go away. I don't know how yet, but there is time to plan. I'm good at planning, when it doesn't all go hideously wrong like Zero did. I'll fix it, somehow. There has to be a way. And then I can be with Trowa after all, and I'll have made it all right so he'll forgive me, and won't stare at me and say my name like he doesn't know me.
The carpet is too rough, and rubs against my cut cheek.
I'm not even afraid of the dream now, because I can tell him I'm going to make it all right.