By the Black Rose
Rated R (NC-17 in later chapters)
AN: Dedicated to Lauren and Saz who issued the challenge. A special thank-you to Stella for beta-reading. **hugs**
There will be lemon scenes in this fic, ie. graphic sexual situations. Please do not read this if it may offend you.
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. I am making no profit on this work.
Fear Not. What is not real, never was and never will be.
What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.
-The Bhagavad Gita, as translated by Eknath Easwaran
Chapter 1
Terror raced through his body, pulsing violently in his veins and biting into his mind like lethal venom. The feeble lifelines strung to more mechanical monsters could not save him from the hellish demon that swallowed his sanity. His tainted body convulsed as the cockpit of the terrible Wing Zero devoured his flesh and bones.
He was pulled from the dark brink of his mental detachment when the harmless blips on a simulation screen grew and multiplied in his vision. He shook his head to keep his focus, and narrowed his eyes at the looming targets, his fingers maneuvering the controls, shooting, destroying the mobile dolls in his sights. He fired a shot, taking down the small dots on the control screen, distant targets with no face or name other than that of his enemy.
Faster, the dolls closed faster, his reaction time increased with every passing second. He fired again, and more suits exploded, bathing the battlefield in debris. The targets were closer, now; he could see the jagged pieces of the broken suits floating in the void of space.
But that’s
impossible. This isn’t real. Is
it?
He clenched his jaw and grabbed the controls tighter, still shooting, aiming at the enemy suits. The frenzied pace of the simulation sped up and continued to run through his mind. He blinked and shook his head again – something wasn’t right; he couldn’t focus! As he wrestled to keep his slipping grasp of consciousness, the devil laughed with fiery breath hissing in his face. You can’t block it out.
Teeth, sharp and jagged crunched into his chest, mashing his bones and pulling his limbs from his body. Foreign fingers wouldn’t release the cockpit controls, despite the pain – despite the pleading from his mind. And so the ‘game’ still ran – ran his mind, and forced his body to react.
A low buzz slid into his ear…The enemy is trying to kill you.
“Who-who are my enemies? My enemies are the ones after my life.” Unearthly golden light grew brighter and saturated his vision. The dolls were coming still faster. He felt the impulse to move his arms, just as a shot was fired from an approaching suit.
“My enemies are the ones after my life. And the ones that toy with my life.” Dr. J and the other scientists appeared before him, as Zero showed him the truth of whom he was fighting. The truth…it knows…
His lip curled into a snarl as more visions of laboratories, syringes, and beatings, images of dying soldiers on a battlefield flooded his mind. Piercing pain pulsed through his body.
He raised the beam saber, the entire cockpit awash with a golden light - it blinded him and yet strangely, he could see. He blinked, and realized that he could see his targets so clearly, now – they were coming towards him. He lunged with his saber, slicing two suits in half. “They’re all my enemies.”
A gray mist edged into his peripheral vision threatening to cloud it over, threatening to take away his sight. The enemy didn’t want him to see! Zero showed him the truth, and the enemy was trying to blind him. He struggled against the gray haze that bound him, every muscle strained in battle.
He cut through a metal door to lead him where his targets awaited him. He launched a blazing round of bullets at the encroaching suits, then felt Zero jerk forward, followed by a searing pain. He blinked, trying once again to focus, but everything was moving too quickly, even himself – he couldn’t stop, and with horror, he found he didn’t want to.
I must destroy the enemy.
The enemy, he knew the enemy was there, but the gray mist was suffocating him, blinding his eyes. A sense of panic invaded his senses, and he ripped the wires attached to his forehead away and swung wildly, slicing through another suit. Sparks flew as it exploded and fell to the ground, more scrap metal, more debris left on the battlefield – one less enemy to kill.
He became vaguely aware of someone screaming his name. They grew louder, the screams; he wanted to cover his ears. His lips were moving, he was speaking to the enemy, but he couldn’t take in what he was saying, all he could hear was the screaming….
The stench of blood filled his nostrils and he felt the bile rise in his stomach. He couldn’t see – there was gray all around him. He shook his head trying to clear his vision, battling for every breath, still fighting against the shroud of darkness. Gray haze suddenly melted into pure white release - a room where only she was there.
Wha..?
Relena…
They were dancing. He was holding her at that party. She smiled at him the way only she could with light blue eyes tinged with a golden aura.
“Heero, I know too much about you. Are you still going to kill me?” She didn’t appear concerned, she only looked, she only looked…beautiful.
“Yeah,” he heard himself reply.
No!
No, I’m not going to kill her!
And then the shadows of the enemy eclipsed the room. They were attacking the school. He couldn’t let her die. He couldn’t let her die because of him - because the enemy had found him.
“Relena,” he cried out as the building crashed down and he reached out, jerking forward – the suit extended its shield to protect her.
“Relena,” he said when the dust cleared and he saw her sprawled out on the ground, dirt in her hair and soiling her dress, but safe, for the moment, from the enemy. He breathed in slowly and deeply, calming his racing pulse.
And then he was falling, falling to the ground. He landed on two feet and moved to her side and helped her up.
“Are you all right,” she asked him with soft eyes still strangely lit with a golden glow. She leaned in close to him and wrapped her delicate limbs around his neck. He felt her fingers curl in his hair.
“Relena,” he whispered an instant before his mouth closed on hers.
His arms moved around her waist, pulling her closer as his tongue sought to deepen their kiss. She fell against him and he could feel her body heat and every feminine curve through the stiff school uniform she wore. His lips moved against hers, his tongue tasting her mouth and then her skin as he sought to devour even more of her, pull her even closer, hold her even tighter. And then the icy, gray mist swirled around them, swirled around him. She evaporated from his embrace and he was lying on the hard metal floor of reality. His head throbbed and he felt strange, cold all over. He looked up and saw her face again.
“Relena…” He collapsed to the ground, tired and spent; his whole body aching, throbbing.
“Who is it? Is it someone from Earth?” He heard a voice say through the misty darkness. But it wasn’t her. All that mattered was it wasn’t her.
* * * * * *
He hadn’t been able to get a decent night’s rest since then. He couldn’t explain it. Sometimes, he’d see parts of a battle he didn’t remember. Other times, he’d see her - asking him if he was all right and winding her arms around his neck.
He would wake up, and swear he felt her fingers in his hair…. But it wasn’t real. He hadn’t kissed her that night, he had taken off in Wing. She found him weeks later at anotmŤÝ@school, but he had ignored her. There had been more important things requiring his attention, like that Oz base he and Duo had set out to destroy.
“I should have killed her,” he thought to himself, and then heard his voice screaming, “No! No, I’m not going to kill her!”
When did I say
that? Why? What’s happening to me?
The Zero system still echoed in his veins, that same hissing sound in his ears telling him that it was truth and what he knew was a lie. But that couldn’t be, there had to be something so wrong about it and what it did to the pilot – even now, weeks later, he could feel the aftershocks of the system, and his body thirsting for it like a drug. He had asked Quatre what it was and how it worked, but the blond boy didn’t seem to know any more than Heero did.
“I
concentrated so hard on the twin buster rifle, I didn’t pay much attention to
the system.”
“Hn.”
Heero scowled at his companion.
“The
Treize Faction soldiers said it was a system that could defeat mobile dolls,
but I remember having strange visions.
It..it kept repeating my memory of my father’s death.”
“Visions?”
“Yes,
I saw my sisters and what looked like something happening in the future. But mostly, it replayed the satellite
explosion that killed my father over and over again.” The young man’s eyes fell
to the floor, his skin a pale-green. In a voice barely above a whisper he
seemed to finally gain the courage to ask, “What did you see?”
Heero
wasn’t expecting that, and yet he should have been. His eyes clenched shut against the images
that taunted him. “I…I didn’t see anything.”
“Heero?”
He
turned away from questioning eyes, his head bowed, but shoulders rigid. “I saw
the battle and my enemies. That’s all.”
It was a horrible sense of déjŕ vu when he stepped off that plane and came face to face with her once again. She had that same gentle look in her eye – sparked with gold – she had when he kissed her. It drew him in for a moment, and he found himself thirsting to know how close the experience in the Zero system came to the real thing. Would her lips taste the same – wet and sweetened with a trace of the punch that had been served the night of the dance? Would her body feel as pleasant pressed against him in such a tender embrace?
He scowled and derailed the errant train of thought. He was not staying.
That was a week ago. He was still here, in her kingdom, lying in a bed far too comfortable, and thinking about her way too often for his liking. She had changed, noticeably changed. There was no longer that searching look, that lost expression in her eyes that had once so mirrored his own. In its wake was a fierce determination and strength he had not known she was capable of possessing.
It frightened him. Not the look, but the fact he noticed the change, that he cared. When she had asked for his help, he had agreed and stayed. Why? He told himself it was in rebellion against Romafeller, and that was part of it. But another part, he would never admit to anyone but himself, was the vision Zero had shown him. He remembered what Quatre said of his visions. “I saw my sisters and what looked like something happening in the future….”
Will it happen in the future? He wondered and rolled over to face the wall, disgusted at himself for thinking about the Zero induced hallucination. It didn’t happen, he reminded himself yet again and tried to shake the tingling feeling in his neck and stinging his lips.
* * * * * *
He woke to blackness and that same chill in the air, but the perfume, her scent lingered in his nostrils the way the taste of her lips seemed to remain long after…long after when? He had never kissed her, had he? It was a hallucination only. So then why did she always regard him so tenderly when she was near? Maybe she was waiting for him…to remember…?
He licked his lips and could taste the sweet, waxy flavor of her lipstick still there. No hallucination could do that; it had to have happened…didn’t it? With effort, he raised his sweat-soaked body from the bed – still sore from the countless and endless battles he couldn’t seem to stop fighting. He had to find Relena, find out if she really tasted like he remembered; he had to find out what was real….
He stumbled into her chambers, his eyes slightly wild, though dark as the Sanq Kingdom’s midnight sky. She was not sleeping, but rather standing at the window glass looking out into an endless black horizon sparked with house lights the way night on the colonies shimmered with stars. To her credit, she did not appear surprised to see him at such an odd hour of morning.
“Heero….” Those lips parted and breathed his name almost reverently. It sounded just like….
“No! Stop it! It’s not real! It can’t…”
She smiled and stepped closer, his body frozen in place as his brain tried to sort through the jumble of images. Dancing with her, then protecting her – that had occurred, that was real. But before he could decipher what had happened next, she was in his arms, her fingers curling in his hair like they had before, his mouth devouring hers….
Her lips…tasted exactly as he remembered, her body as soft and pleasurable… New images tinged with desire wafted through his mind, awakening a distinct but foreign sense of longing from deep within.
He found himself wanting something more from her than just a kiss….