Fire in the Sky Part 2

Duo drove into the darkness. The sky sparkled, as if the moon wasn't visible and they didn't have headlights to guide them, the stars and colonies would be enough to light their way. Duo drove with one hand on the steering wheel, and one hanging out the window, a cigarette lighting the night like a red contrail, sparks flying into the night. He brought it up to take one more drag before tossing it out the window like a dying comet.

Heero was pressed up against the car door, as if he curled himself into a small enough ball, he would disappear. Duo couldn't see his face; it was pressed against the windowsill.

He let out a breath of smoke in a sigh, seeing it blow across the inside of the windshield. He heard a soft sound from the passenger seat, but when he looked over at Heero, the ex Wing pilot hadn't moved.

"Heero..."

Heero took in a deep breath, and let it out. Another. He didn't move.

Finally, Duo pulled over on the side of the highway, onto a bluff overlooking the ocean. He turned off the ignition and took Heero by the shoulder, turning Heero to look at him. Heero's eyes were blank and hazed, as if he had been drowning in his own thoughts and hadn't swam to the surface yet.

Heero stared back at him... shook his head, and turned away.

"Heero, man... damn," Duo said softly.

"Did you see the way they looked at me?"

"So what? They're just stupid candy-ass civvies, Heero. You know that. Who gives a fuck what they think?"

"I made a fool of myself." Heero's voice was flat.

"That never bothered you before."

"Things were different before."

Duo was quiet for a few moments. He couldn't think of anything to say to that.

~*~

Duo. It was Duo again. He hadn't seen Duo since... those times. So... was it those times? Would the war ever be over? Heero rubbed his eyes, hoping the vision of Duo would fade away like all the other hallucinations... but Duo was still there.

Duo had always been there.

Heero reached up to steady himself on the dashboard, but Duo reached out and took his hand. Folded his own hand over it. Heero could feel the calluses there.

The silence in the car was very loud.

"Duo..." Wearily, Heero leaned his head forward against the dashboard, closing his eyes. His bangs fell into his face, hiding his eyes.

"It's over, Heero."

Heero closed his eyes tighter, driving the vision of Duo away, the feel of the vinyl dashboard cool beneath his fingertips. So there really wasn't another war. There was no more battles except the ones he saw in his dreams every night...the ones he fought in his own head. Nothing more.

He was going crazy.

"It's never going to be over."

"Don't say that, Duo said fiercely, looking up into the sky through the windshield. Absently, he tried to pick out his colony; he felt so far from home. "If it's never going to be over, then all the work we did was bullshit. All the people we killed was for nothing."

"Maybe it was."

~*~

Heero stared out the window, feeling Duo's hand lying across his, not bothering to move it. He felt detached from himself, as if he was floating in the space between stars.

He remembered the war, sitting around a shabby table in a cold, dark warehouse, hearing the boots of OZ soldiers outside the doors, but sitting and letting Trowa teach him how to play cards anyway while their guns laid on the edge of the table. He thought that no matter how beautiful and charming and idealistic Relena and Milliardo and all the rest were, he'd see them all dead just to be able to go back to that time, mock-glaring at Trowa over a hand of faded cards, a bottle of Cujo Mescal between them.

"Heero?"

He looked over at Duo. Duo was looking back over at him. "Heero, you can do this." Duo sighed softly, drawing his hand back. "We can. I know it."

"Hai," Heero whispered, but already the days and weeks and months and years ahead seemed impossible to him.

Heero looked out and saw the destroyed ruins of a mobile suit on the side of the road opposite the bluff. The hulk of killing metal and busted circuits was already beginning to rust, a tired old engine of destruction. It wasn't particularly unusual to see destroyed mobile suits, even here in the Cinq Kingdom.

"We won," Heero whispered. "We won, you bastards."

/ For now. /

Heero shook his head at that thought. For now was all he needed. He turned away from it with an effort. That was in the past. The only thing that was here was a dead mobile suit and Duo, sitting across the car from him, dark violet eyes shining in the darkness and the glow of the dashboard.

"Duo..."

"Yeah, bud?"

Heero's voice was choked, as if each word was harder to say than the one before it. "Can I... stay... with you?"

He was surprised to feel Duo's arms thrown around him, the braided boy's face against his neck.

Well, not really surprised. Duo had gotten very good at sneak-attacking him with such lavish displays of affection, especially after figuring out his half-hearted declarations to kill the American were empty threats.

But this hug was different. Duo didn't jerk away quickly as he laughed, expecting Heero to jerk his braid or grab his collar and push him off. Because Heero didn't do either of those things. He sank his head back into the carseat, closing his eyes, just losing himself in the sensation of Duo's skin against his, the feel of someone touching him that wasn't trying to train him or kill him. For once, Duo didn't laugh. Didn't pull away.

There was a cruiseliner out on the ocean, shooting off more fireworks, their terrible beauty reflected over the waves in a beautiful mimic of the death and destruction Heero had known all his life. It's nothing, Heero told himself.

Just more fire in the sky.

Heero couldn't hear the fireworks over the sound of his own heartbeat. He couldn't see them; his eyes were closed, his face buried against the top of Duo's head, Duo's hair tickling his nose.

More things had changed than he thought.

OWARI

Note: There's going to be a sequel to this, but this is as much as I'm entering in the contest. (I'm separating it into a fic and a sequel instead of adding more chapters, because it might become one of my unfinishable multichapter fics, and then I won't be able to enter it in the contest, as it would still be incomplete. ^_^) So just think of this as short of like a one-shot with an epilogue. Yeah.

 

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