Fated

By zapenstap

Relena Darilan was a public speaker and a celebrity in the political world. Her personal office resided on the fifth floor of the Public Relations building, where a large window yielded a view of a city sinking into the cool darkness of twilight. The young woman did not see it, but as she worked, the sun had set. Across the stretch of the horizon, the last light of the golden day flared in a bright line reaching from one end of the world to the other, a light only to be vanquished as the body of the sun was dragged forcibly down beneath the roll of the earth. The clouds were sitting low, almost seeming to sink after the daylight, but the stars gleamed forth, the blossoming night sky pushing the clouds to the edges of the earth like a curtain drawing closed.

Relena felt the rising moonlight on her face, a cold, pale light that clashed with the harsh yellow emitting from the lamp on her office desk. Her drained coffee cup glinted white as she looked over the last few papers. Already grainy eyes were beginning to feel strained from staring at rows and rows of tiny black print, the words shoved and twisted together like wet ink spilled on a plastic surface, but at length the last of the papers were read through, signed, appropriately stacked and filed.

This woman of slight frame and a more youthful face than her countenance suggested, sighed, tossed the garbage in the trashcan by her ankle and stood up, stretching her arms above her head and lightly cracking her back all along her spine. Disheveled, she ran a hand through the length of her unbound brown-blonde hair and reveled in closing her eyes just for a moment. Then she lifted her purse from the floor by her desk and strode out of the office.

At the secretary's desk outside, she maneuvered to the phone and checked for messages. There were three, all from Jonathan, starting at five and practically repeating again every hour with increasing irritation as to where she was and what was keeping her from dinner. Biting her lip, Relena erased the messages and immediately called home on her cell phone as she walked out to her car.

"Jonathan?"

His answering tone was the mellow, laid-back casual that she was used to, the soothing voice that relaxed her from head to toe with its liquid velvet quality, rugged as a lion's growl and yet somehow managing to sound as musical as a songbird. The effect of his voice on her was like that of a cat being stroked from ears to tail. Inside, she folded, collapsing inward as the responsibility, the decisions, the once-cherished independence that caked around her like a wax shield during the day melted and drained away. At length, she shook herself, calling her mind to attend on his words and the hint of distress in his tone. "Where are you?" he said. "Dinner got cold a long time ago. You were supposed to be home early tonight."

"I know," she said, bending her head forward, hand on her forehead. "I'm sorry. I’m sorry. I'm coming. Is it too late to enjoy the evening?"

He was quiet for a minute. "No, it's not too late. I'll order something for both of us."

"I don't mind re-heating dinner," she said, but she knew it was pointless to argue even without the stony silence. "I'm on my way."

Her feet hurt on the drive home, crammed into closed-toed, heeled shoes, her body tired of the silk and linen draping her shoulders, the nylons hot on her legs and the skirt that was far too much of a hassle. She wanted to go home and drop into bed with Jonathan's arms around her. She was always so tense and skittish. She wanted nothing but a day of rest and a good book. She had wanted rest for almost a year now, but for some reason she kept working, tirelessly, because she needed to.

How Jonathan came into her life was almost a mystery to her. To look at them now it was like they had been together forever, like a couple married for years. She even lived with him, had for several months, and she wasn't sure how that began either. She met Jonathan almost directly after she found out about Heero, and they were a couple faster than she had ever thought herself capable of becoming close to anybody. From the outside everything looked so perfect. She was financially stable with a generous inheritance, a lady of manners, dignity, wealth and fame. Her relationship with Jonathan was crazy, but structuring and consistent. They had met and he asked for her number. He called and took her out on a few wonderful and blessedly distracting dates, dinner and dancing, the opera, the theatre, a hike in the mountains and trips to the beach. Two weeks and they were in a serious relationship.

She parked the car in the driveway, not bothering to pull it into the garage and announce her homecoming. Opening the front door would be indication enough for that, and she didn't want Jonathan to sit at the table waiting for her entrance any longer than absolutely necessary. She never made him wait for anything. So it was with a spirit of determination dug up from the depth of her exhaustion, that she got out of her car, walked up the cement step to her door in her two-inch high-heeled shoes, and walked in with a smile.

Warm yellow lighting hit her in the face, soaking into her skin. Home lights were the sunlight of the evening after a long day. The wood floors of the entryway echoed against the painful clatter of her shoes until she took them off and set them by the door. Without her shoes she slid easily along the golden brown wood in her nylons, wishing to discard them too. Leaving her purse with her shoes at the door, she hung her coat in the entryway closet and removed to the dining room.

Jonathan, twenty-five, tall, dark and beautiful, sat waiting for her, the dishes set and Chinese take-out sitting in the middle of the table. He smiled at her his short, appraising smile, which she ducked her head modestly to receive. His brown eyes glinted, sharp and mysterious as the first moment she saw him huddled in his brown leather jacket by a bus stop, hiding depths of unspoken thoughts and buried perceptions. It was never easy to get him talking about whatever he chose to keep hidden, even after a night of passion, but she accepted it with a mentally dismissive note.

"Come on, sit down," he said mildly, gesturing to the seat across from him. She sat down readily, sharing a smile with him as her body relaxed into the hard-backed wooden chair with the heavy curved armrests and solid legs. He smiled at her too, lifting his eyes just slightly, the curve of the lips barely pronounced. "It must have been a busy day for you to be home so late, Lena. Did you have a lot to do?"

He alone had ever called her that, Lena, or by any affectionate pet name. She was Relena to everybody else, even Miss Relena or Relena Darilan, though with everyone far away in space she rarely socialized outside of work anymore.

"Yes," she replied, but they both knew that her work was not what either of them would enjoy talking about. "But I finished it all."

"Of course you did," he said. "You always do, don't you? It's who you are."

She accepted that dismissively too. Naturally, she was still doing her work. Her proposals and movements for the continued peace of the universe were as strong and successful as ever. There was no danger in her position; everyone loved her. There was no war, no need for weapons and no need for destruction. She was the Angel of Peace and the world idolized her. For years following the war she had been center news, not to mention an object of social speculation, though she had dropped out of the limelight. In the world that they lived in today, there was no need for fears or tears.

But she cried. It hit her at odd moments, jump starting her heart at four in the morning or freezing her in speculative shock in the middle of the day. She would wake from bed in a fit of emotion, wet tears on her cheeks, or snub her toes or shins against furniture in her office and not feel the bruises. She avoided certain places, certain people and certain subjects. It wasn't that she was a coward, nor had she anything to be hurting about. It just felt so terribly strange, like what was meant to be had been horribly disrupted and now here she was, bereft of what she had depended on the most, her objectives scattered. Perhaps it was only in her mind. Everyone always told her she had assumed a great deal, even if she asked for nothing, and what was it really to lose what she had never had?

"Here, eat something," Jonathan prodded. "You're probably famished."

She accepted his offering of dinner as he selected rice and chicken and a variety of other side dishes to fill up her plate before he handed it to her. She ate delicately, not really concentrating on the food, letting her mind unravel from the intensity of the day. He just watched her eat for the most part, as if admiring something picturesque, though she knew she must look like hell. Still, a part of her was flattered, and her heart stirred warmly. After she gulped down a few mouthfuls, conversation began. Jonathan told her the thoughts he had had that day waiting or her to get home, strange and deep thoughts, about all sort of things that intrigued his mind. She asked him questions but rarely commented in way of opinion. These ideas of his were just occupations of his mind, mere whimsical fantasies that were soon forgotten or contradicted, and therefore--as he had told her before--there was no use in debating them.

Coming from no remarkable social status, Jonathan worked a number of odd jobs, enjoyed books and movies, and in some ways was an odd match for her. She knew this, but then, it was not remarkable considering the precedence. Jonathan had an air about him that she was attracted to, an intelligent and unpredictable spirit that was both adventurous and dangerous. It was what she needed after a long day of work after longer weeks of monotonous drudgery. When they first started dating, she had been almost irrationally upset about things she could not control, but motorcycle rides, midnight swimming, crazy stunts and Jonathan's constant direction comforted her, his strength steadied her and his dangerous flair breathed life to the parts of her that longed for distraction. She found herself relying on him. Sexual intimacy left her limp, sweaty, gasping and sometimes bruised. She had never thought of herself as that kind of a lover, but then, there were a lot of things that she had never thought herself to be that had materialized since her girlhood.

"I was thinking about us too," he said as she finished eating, still watching her with that appraising eye. "You know."

She knew, and smiled. Lately he had been bringing up the ambiguity of their relationship in subtle ways, catching her on the stairs and mentioning how rarely she told him she loved him, asking her what she thought of the future late at night, buying her presents... tons of presents. He never mentioned marriage, but it seemed like he wanted to illicit from her some kind of long-term commitment, some promise or understanding or devotion. She wasn't sure what held her back from giving it. He had taken such good care of her this past year it was impossible not to feel she ought to give him something, anything, to settle his mind. It was expected that she take care of this tall, dark, mysterious stranger who kept to himself and possessed her so thoroughly. In the light from the quaint chandelier hanging overhead, Jonathan's eyes almost looked midnight blue. But they weren't.

It was several moments before she realized she was staring at him, and he at her.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "You look a little pale."

She knew it, and flushed furiously. When she didn't answer, he got up, walked around the table toward her and began to caress her shoulders, kneading the tired muscles and threading fingers through her hair. Her shoulders bent and she took deep breaths, banishing the intruding thoughts that overtook her sometimes, more often of late this week. "I know what you're thinking," he whispered as she lowered her head under his administrations and tried to relax under the gentle stroke of his fingers. "I know it's a hard thing for you, but you really need to let him go."

She nodded, eyes closed, enjoying the digging of his fingers. "I know," she said. "Thank you."

"You've got me now," he added. "I'll take care of you. I understand that this Heero guy meant a great deal to you in the past, but he left you. I’m here now. Just forget about him. It’s been a long time." His massage turned into a suggestive caress, which she accepted instantly, and relaxed as he lowered his head and breathed softly in her ear and on her neck. Shivers tingled down her spine. "Do you want to go upstairs?"

But even as he moved her upstairs, her thoughts wandered. This was the anniversary week, the week she had learned Heero was gone, out of her life forever like a wisp of smoke, the full week it had taken her to accept the fact, possibly the blackest week of her life. Today was the eve of that anniversary, and memories weighed her under, like dark waters closing over her head. She hardly took notice of entering the bedroom, or the soft mattress of the bed meeting her backside.

She remembered walking with Heero once, on a night just like this, long after the sun had set. Over grassy hills they had wandered under the stars in lightweight jackets, away from the city lights, just the two of them. When she began to shiver he draped his coat over hers unconsciously. The scent of his jacket filled her head and she could scarcely concentrate on anything else. Like usual, they didn't speak much, or touch, but they had wandered in private company for several hours, silent and appreciative of the beauty of the open night sky, limitless beyond the confines of the earth. It felt so long ago now, and she remembered it with a pang of regret, wondering if there wasn't something she should have done to change things. They had been something not quite friends, something far removed from lovers, and yet the connection had been intimate in her heart, and difficult to release.

In the present, Jonathan grasped her chin, a dark shape hovering over her in a bedroom lit only by the light of the moon. The sheets around her shivering body were ghostly in their paleness, reflecting a blinding light. Her own bare skin looked gray. His body was just a dark shape, coursing with a man's hot blood. His fingers gripped her chin firmly as his eyes gleamed suddenly out of the darkness. "Lena," he whispered. "Lena, what are you thinking about?" From the way he said it, it was like he knew perfectly well.

"Nothing," she said, closing her eyes. Heero's seemed to stare at her from the inside, glaring, accusatory eyes almost, as if he were watching her, which of course, was impossible. "I love you, Jonathan."

He looked unconvinced and she supposed that was the incentive to up the standard that night. It was still a shock when he hit her across the face. He had promised he wouldn't do that anymore.

Her jaw remembered it the next morning, especially when she was confronted with a rough red mark imprinted on her face. She awoke to it with only vague memories, feeling the way she always did after a night with him, mostly exhausted and often moody. Seeing the mark, Jonathan exclaimed his apology in overwhelming tones of sympathy, as if he had not remembered that it had happened. He asked if make-up would hide it or would she rather stay home so he could dote on her? She could call in sick and he would make it up to her. Accepting his apology, she smiled, but still ended up going to work, more out of compulsion than anything else, and when she returned home she found a table laden with roses, a card lamenting further apology. He wasn’t always bad. Just sometimes, especially when he was in a temper, or if he had been drinking. That night as she lay awake in bed with Jonathan’s sleeping form beside her, the white wall across the room seemed to stare at her until her weariness sunk into her bones.

It was several minutes before she realized the person walking along beside her was Heero. She hung onto his arm as they strolled together in some undiscovered country, awash in golden sunlight and resplendent in a blanket of soft-petal flowers. She was dressed in a pleated white skirt and a pale blue sweater, something she might have worn in High School, her hair pulled up behind her head in a silk white ribbon with flat-soled shoes on her feet. In the dream, she appeared to herself younger, livelier and more innocent than she ever remembered actually being. Heero's face and form were vague in her mind, her memory struggling to reconstruct a shattered image. Whatever he was saying was lost to her because she kept staring at his face and trying to make it solidify into the clear, sharp features she knew she remembered if she tried. Intrinsically, she knew it was a dream, and her difficulty in bringing a clear face of Heero to the forefront bothered her only a little, as it bothers one when the scenery changes without explanation in a dream.

It was not much of a surprise when the scenery did change. One minute she was hanging on the arm of her soldier and protector, admiring blue skies and flowers blooming in the grass to either side, the next they emerged together on a secluded highway curving up a mountain that overlooked the sea and a rocky beach. Suddenly, she found herself alone and staring into the ocean from the edge of a cliff. The land about was quieter, deathly silent in the way of dreams, without even the titter of a bird or the sound of a car driving up the mountainous road to crack the white-room muteness. The colors of the mountain and the road were pale as unclear memories, like drawings on white paper filled in with colored pencil, but the sea was a deep, striking and fathomless blue.

In the water, Heero was floating on his back, fully clothed, staring up at the birds wheeling in the sky as she watched from far above, leaning over the road rail.

"Why don't you come in for a swim?" she heard him say, though he wasn't looking at her, his mouth wasn't moving and the distance was great.

"I don't really feel like it," she murmured in an almost inaudible reply.

"I've been waiting," she heard his voice intone calmly. "Where have you been?"

"It looks cold," she returned in her distraction, and wondered why she would be the one to shiver if he was in the water. "I can't see you very well anymore, Heero," she added quietly with pained regret, heaving a heavy sigh. "You're too far away."

"Whose arm were you hanging on to?"

Then he turned to look at her. He was not swimming in the water. His face was a pale, ghostly white, the pupils of his eyes glossy and unfocused, arms and legs limp in the water and seeming larger and sicklier than she remembered. The chill that had settled on the surface of her skin bit in and buried deep to freeze her heart. She suddenly had the idea that the man she was walking with on the path before had not really been Heero at all. The Heero in the water was perfectly clear in form and face to the minute detail, down to the very last strand of unmanageable hair and the peculiar glint in midnight blue, dead eyes. As her heart beat like a drum in her chest, he moved suddenly, stiffly, his pallid face turning to look at her on his neck while the rest of his body remained limp and bloated in the sea. He looked at her though with sharp, penetrating, dark blue eyes staring out of a clearly dead white face.

She screamed and woke up in a sweat, sitting up in bed gasping, her body shaking and her throat dry. Jonathan stirred beside her, waking suddenly and sitting up to grab her shoulders. He mumbled in sleepy confusion. "Lena, what is it?"

Chest heaving, she looked around her, for a moment completely lost. The hands on her bare shoulders felt like the hands of a specter and she trembled under their touch, though unable to find the strength to shake them away. She could still see Heero's eyes, live, piercing eyes staring out of a pasty pale face, staring into her soul, speaking words that terrified her. Her whole body shook like a leaf in a windstorm. She could not still the vibration of her fingers.

"Ghosts," Jonathan whispered, sounding more alert as he brushed her hair with his hands. Deep breaths filled her lungs with air as she sat as still as she could, cold and afraid. "They're just ghosts, baby," he said again, and his voice slid like oil down her back. She hunched her shoulders, suddenly more afraid of the heat in his body than of the chill in her heart. "Calm down," he said in more parental, masterful tones, harsher to cure her hysteria. "It was just a nightmare, Lena. I'm here now. Stop crying." It was a command.

Bending her head over her knees, she wept like a child and apologized fruitlessly.

The next day her eyes were shadowed from a sleepless night. She went to work groggy, did her job in a stupor, and determined it was better to go home early then fall asleep at her desk. So it was that at two instead of five, she climbed into her car and went home early for the first time in a year. Again she parked in the driveway so as not to announce her presence. Walking up to the doorway with her keys in hand, excited to surprise Jonathan with an early arrival, she was baffled to hear voices inside. Her mind reasoned that he must be on the telephone, but why she stopped to listen she didn't know.

"No, baby, she's at work,” Jonathan's voice came clearly. Silence for a moment. “Yeah, her old friend or lover or whatever." There was another pause, and then a laugh. "Well of course it's a thrill. I mean, you know who she is, right?”

It wasn’t the first time she had overheard such a conversation. For a brief moment, Relena wondered why she let it go on. Hand trembling, she somehow managed to get her keys in the door. He would hang up when she came in and then they could both just forget about it.

I should be angry, she thought abstractedly, but what she felt most was terror. A corner of her mind told her he was to blame, but the larger part found nothing much with which to defend herself.

He hit me, she told herself, and tried to savor the portent of it. He hits me! It was a shock, though she couldn’t say why. Her mind spiraled, dropping almost out of her consciousness as flashbacks of the past year cascaded like falling logs on the part of her brain that was slowly flaming into awareness. A sharpness of mind returned to her, something that had shuffled in fog since she first met Jonathan.

It had been gradual, she realized, almost unnoticeable, and hidden in extravagant gifts and incredible dates and mindless attraction, but Jonathan, quite simply, was controlling, greedy and abusive. She remembered the first time he hurt her and how frightened she had been. Why had she accepted it? Had she been simply afraid to call him on it, to leave? She had never been a coward. Her strength in the past had been uncanny, but back then nothing made much sense and his control allowed her to be less responsible for herself, less responsible for anything. Responsibility and independence were not what she had wanted. She remembered that there was pleasure mixed with the pain usually, perhaps in such slow degrees that eventually she could not tell them apart. Trained like a dog, she began to associate pain with pleasure until she did what she was told on command and liked it. Suddenly she realized how twisted it all seemed. His ideas suddenly seemed a bit crazy to her. And the fact that her opinions were boycotted sent a momentary chill down her spine. And what of dinner, with the way he smiled at her, petted her, the way he told her he loved her and then demanded that she say it back?

Did she love Jonathan? She froze with her hand still on the door, sinking her forehead against the wood, the keys hanging forgotten in the lock. Jonathan was still talking inside, but in a different tone, to the same girl or a different one?

Without thinking, she opened the door to the house, walking like a zombie into her a hollow home with tottering steps. She dropped her things where they might fall and looked for some place to collapse. Where had her strength gone? It had left with the boy who she used to measure herself up to. The images were rushing up now, the memories catching hold of her consciousness with wild fangs, threatening to pull her down, down into the depths.

Jonathan looked and felt an awful lot like Heero. She thought it had to do with her taste, but what if she had been looking for someone to replace Heero? The resemblance was subtle, but striking. Both Heero and Jonathan loved sports and books and guns. They were both tall dark and handsome mysteries. Heero had been goodness wrapped not in darkness, but in a cool self-possession, determination and a sort of shadowed loneliness. Jonathan was darkness wrapped in a faint mockery of goodness and adoration. They were not the same at all. Now that she thought about it, they didn't even look the same.

"Relena?"

She heard Jonathan but did not respond. He came into the room like a blur, grasping her wrists, her waist. He suddenly appeared too large, too big and overbearing for her. Like a kitten, she pushed him away with only feeble attempts and was unsuccessful, her knees weakening in his supportive, suffocating grasp.

Her eyes filled with tears. "I miss him still."

Jonathan looked annoyed, but she hardly noticed. He began talking to Lena, but she couldn't make much sense of what he was saying. His prattling all sounded the same to her.

Heero was clear in her head again, not beautiful and mysterious, but just Heero. He was a soldier, in uniform or in civilian costume, attentive in class, a quiet reader, a quiet sportsman, opinionated and eloquent when he chose to open his mouth. He was Heero in all his awkward social interactions, his long silences, his deep pride, intelligence, courage and buried kindness that all who came to know him were either instantly smitten or confused by.

"You have way too much on your mind," Jonathan was saying.

"Let me go," she requested. "Please leave me alone, Jonathan. I don't want to talk about it."

She had made him angry. She knew it by the way his hands tightened on her wrists and his eyebrows lowered over hardening eyes. Normally, she would have sought safety by drawing closer to him, by yielding to his embrace, but Heero was staring at her in the back of her head and his eyes were more painful. Gasping, she pulled away again.

"I know what today is," he said after a moment.

She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut. "Don't," she pleaded.

"Why not? I hate to say it, but it happens all the time. People have the right to make their own decisions about their lives. You told me it had been a rainy day, gray skies for a week. People get depressed."

Sinking, she choked back a moan encroaching on despair. She remembered the day. She remembered the rain, the cold, the dark and the silence. Was that the reason? The weather? "Please don't." But it was too late to dam the flood.

They all came to her door together, four of Heero's old friends, probably under Quatre's advisement, that sensitive, blonde boy with the child-like face. The first thing they told her was to sit down. She saw it on their faces before they said anything. The first words out of her mouth were, “what has happened to Heero?” She still remembered how numb her hands and feet had felt and how chilled her heart when they only looked at her for what seemed hours. When the attempt was made to break the silence, Duo broke down in her living room, unable to say anything. It was Trowa who told her the facts, in cold, pedantic tones. Wufei gave his raging opinions, his bellows falling like blows on her ears. For once, Quatre had nothing sympathetic or comforting to say, but the contrast between the fire that flew from the Chinese's man's mouth, the deadness in Trowa's eyes and the deep wounded look on Quatre's face had left no place for her flailing heart to seek succor.

The questions plagued them relentlessly. How could such a handsome, inspiring youth with amazing reflexes and constant awareness, drive a car through the guardrails of a mountain cliff by the sea? It had been a stormy night and the roads were bad, but Heero was a careful driver. What's more, he had had nowhere to go that night, no reason to be out on the road.

His body was found face down on the beach, sand in his clothes and pieces of glass from the window shield dug so deep into his skull that with the matted hair and the bloating of his flesh from the salt water, it had been difficult to identify him. Heero hadn't had ID, but Wufei recognized him when the body was brought in. What the young Chinese man thought or felt when he walked in on that unidentified body and discovered the remnants of someone he once knew he never shared, but it must have been powerful because after the funeral he left town and never returned.

How she blanched when they said it was suicide; even now it was impossible to know for sure. If it was suicide, he left no confirming note with regrets to burden those he left behind with guilt, nor did he talk to anybody beforehand in such a way that anyone thought especially dark or odd. If Heero committed suicide, he did it in the way he did everything, quietly, without drawing attention to himself, and so thoroughly as to leave no evidence whatever. The anger, the confusion, the black despair that smote her when they came to her door with the news crashed into in waves that did not cease.

"It was his choice," Jonathan said coldly, and the words pierced deep and painfully like cold-searing ice in the heart.

What had he been thinking? He was dead. Did he understand what that meant before he engineered it? In the rest of their lives, in the fabric of heaven, there was a gaping hole where his body's life had been ripped away, a gap through which they all spiraled like chaotic winds in a torn wind tunnel. The hiss of death, the nothingness, the hollow empty regret and rage billowed out and was repressed in their living bodies. Did he consider how it would affect them? Did he stop to think what such an act would do to the living and the outlook they had on life knowing someone she thought had so much to live for had committed suicide? For herself, she had stumbled in darkness for days, crying, sleeping, dreaming, demanding why why why until her bruised heart broke and bled inside her chest. Alcohol, pills, overwork and eventually Jonathan filled her life. Jonathan took the pain away by making it feel like an illusion until she managed to distance herself and then forget about it.

And then Jonathan abused her. She knew she had let him. Maybe she wanted to be abused.

"Who do you talk to on the phone?" she muttered, but she checked herself hastily. There was a glint in his eyes, that quick-witted, lying look she immediately recognized and just as readily ignored. Still fighting to free herself, she turned away from him. "Never mind. I don't care."

His features smoothed instantly. He acted as if the insinuation really had not been made. "You know I told you I've had similar experiences…"

Yes, he had told her countless tales. Vague stories about dead people he had known, friends, family maybe, it had never been very clear. He talked about them to her as if it was supposed to be a comfort. I've known more dead people than you, he seemed to say, and began to list the ways his acquaintances had killed themselves or one another. Which had jumped off bridges, which had taken lead bullets to the head and which had died in car crashes or as soldiers in combat were a blur in her mind. She had listened with white lips and cold feet, unable to say a word.

He laughed now, his eyes taking on that glazed, half-seeing look. The grip he had on her arms tightened until she gasped, but he didn’t loosen up. “Like when Andy was showing off on the balcony,” he said, “drunk as shit. We thought it was so funny. Even when he was falling, someone made a joke. Goddammit.”

“You’re hurting me,” she whispered, struggling in his grip. “Jonathan. Jonathan, let go. Please.”

“God, you’re pathetic,” he hissed at her, and leaned in toward her face so that she shuddered. There were rough, red marks embedded in her flesh, but she hardly noticed. “Go upstairs and lie down,” he told her.

A surge of defiance shot through her. “No.”

He wrenched her arm.

She gasped, falling forward. “Ow!”

“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice.” A moment of breathless silence filled the air between them. “Sorry, baby,” he said. “It’s just…”

Tears left a salty residue on her cheeks. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” she choked. He still gripped her arm firmly between in his fist, but she was almost unaware of the danger. Her own hair fell over her face, plastered to her cheeks by the tears in her eyes. In her heart a feeling of calm enveloped her, and from it came a clarity that swept through her mind. Raising her eyes, she stared at his face, breathing in the air around them.

“I don’t love you,” she said. The words dropped from her mouth quietly, almost like an afterthought.

He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“I love Heero.” Tears still filled her eyes, but through them she smiled a sorrowful regret. “You remind me of him in some ways, Jonathan, but he never hurt me. I’m sorry if I…”

His face was twisted. “For all the…”

She babbled on, knowing that murderous look in his eyes for what it was, and yet unable to stop the flow of words that had fought for so long to free themselves. The fear in her heart rose with each word that escaped her lips, and her eyes widened as she watched his reaction, but she could not stop speaking. “I don’t think we’re good together,” she said. “Let me go. I want to be on my own.”

She anticipated the pain before he spoke, but the words came out on their own. For a moment she panicked. He towered over her, a great, looming force of hardened flesh and muscle, coat loose on his shoulders, probably a knife or a gun on his person. Her heart began to beat with the force of a steamrolling train, a faint wind rushing in her ears. Jonathan grasped her about the waist and she suddenly realized how small she was in comparison to him, how delicate, how weak. Frail arms pushed against his chest in complaint, putting force against a wall she could never hope to budge.

He spoke quietly, his breath hissing in her ear, his grip tight. “You want to break up with me? Over your old, dead boyfriend?” By the end it was a shout.

She cried and twisted, trying to fight her way to the door, making steadily louder sounds of protest. His fingers caught her hair and shoulders, keeping her in his grasp as she struggled. The pain was clarifying. Instinctively it told her to keep still, that if she didn’t resist the pain would stop, but a deeper instinct drove her to almost mad flailing, struggling like an angry cat in the arms of a bear.

“You’ve been cheating on…” she began, and met the fury that surged up in his eyes.

The force of his entire arm across her jaw sent her head flying, her body reeling, the floor rushing up to slam into her face. Every bone jarred, every limb twisted, every muscle in pain, she lay still in quiet shock. Only vaguely could she hear him shouting, ranting, pacing above her as he waved a hand curled around the black handle of a gun, caressing it. Blood trickled into her mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, shaking inside, unable to piece together the fragments of this broken dream. She watched him, the thoughts in his head, murderous thoughts lurking under that cool, dark exterior. Tears mingled with the blood on her face.

Jonathan muttered to himself, passing a hand through his hair. “…of all the stupefying, god-forsaken things to say. I’ve tried to be good to her. If I knew she was so fucking mental, I never would have…” He turned his eyes upon her suddenly. “Sorry, Lena. Are you okay?” She got slowly to her feet, inching toward the door. He stopped when she moved. Brown eyes glued to blue. “Baby?”

“Don’t…” she began in a quivering voice she hardly recognized as her own.

“It just makes me crazy,” he said. “What did this old boyfriend of yours do for you? Why was he so fucking impressive?”

She whispered her reply. “Heero wasn’t my boyfriend.” The utterance of his name send a shaft of liquid silver through her heart. At once she was cold and warm, hot and shaking.

Jonathan took a breath of the air in the room as if inhaling smoke from his cigarette. A muscle in his chin twitched as he looked at her, but he did not move, and he assumed no expression for several moments. “You slut.”

She swallowed. He advanced. The baleful grimace on his face swallowed the light in the apartment he approached her, his fingers curling around the handle of the gun. She could see that he wasn’t thinking. She breathed in and out, and sought for the handle of the door behind her.

“Are you leaving?” he said quietly, too quietly, for the snakes hiss was in his voice as he lifted his gun. “Where are you going?”

“Leave me alone,” she said, and opened the door.

“If you come back here, I’ll kill you.”

The door closed and she was outside it. In her tears, she didn’t know where she was going. By some miracle she had her purse over her arm, her keys jangling like weapons as she took them out with shaking hands. Her car took her to a memorial, the graveyard where Heero had been buried. Her thoughts were too muddled to separate why she was going there, or even what she was thinking about. She sought Heero in her state of frenzied fear; she sought for a body buried deep beneath the earth, decaying bones and flesh.

It was dark and a light drizzle was falling when she reached the cemetery, parking her car crooked in the parking lot. The rain mingled with the tears on her cheeks until she could not tell the difference. The chill in her heart was no different from the temperature in the air. The frost on her soul could make an ice tomb for her body to rest in. Dark green grass sank under her feet. Worms came up from the underground to soak in the rain. Her clothes were spotted with water, her hair in tangled strings about her face. But her feet knew the way to that slab of gray stone, the impressive marker carved in brilliance to mark the burial ground of a hero, a prince, a soldier and a man she loved beyond anything in the world, even if she had never told him.

She sank to her knees before it and let out a sob of pain and rage and fear.

“Weak,” Wufei had shuddered to say. “There is no weaker path than this! Heero, you deceived me. A true soldier does not so willingly surrender to death. Why did you bother fighting at all if you are only to end it this way? Why did you fight if you meant only to kill yourself?” She remembered the tense whispers. “Coward. Coward. You can fight, but you can’t live. Coward.” His pain was strange to the rest of them. He ranted and raved like a lunatic, but could seemingly find no peace with himself. It was when Trowa caught him crying that he left town. No one, not even Sally, knew where he had gone.

Quatre and Trowa were quiet and contemplative. They just withdrew quietly, like apparitions, as if Heero’s death and Wufei’s disappearance triggered an end to the circle of the friendship between the pilots. As far as she knew, Quatre was doing okay. He had cried like a child when it happened, but he had recovered. Trowa hardly changed. He remarked that he had once tried to follow Heero into death, but had seen the error of it before. Catherine was enough for him to just forget the whole affair.

Relena might have been all right. If she had stayed in contact, she might have recovered. In a way, she thought it was her fault. She might have said something to him, but she had thought that in his silence he understood. Noin tried to comfort her, everyone did, but Relena couldn’t face them bravely anymore. Her courage seemed to be gone. She knew they were all waiting for her to say something to encourage them, and after awhile she managed to smile at least, but the woman who the world associated with hope and peace stopped giving speeches. She stopped listening too. In a way, she stopped thinking altogether. But she went back to work, and when she came home she smiled until her skin felt stretched over her skull. But it hurt. It hurt so much she eventually began to avoid the people who needed her to smile until they forgot her. It worked all to well.

Now, before Heero’s grave, all she could do was shiver and weep.

She remembered something Duo said once. Quatre said that Duo took it harder than anyone in a way. The cheerful pilot was silent for a day or two, and then he was happy, happier than anyone had ever seen him. He went out to clubs, socialized with a million girls, playing a million sports. He worked two jobs, laughed, made jokes, and called them all at least once a day to make plans that never materialized. He broke up with Hilde. That was one warning, but it was difficult to believe the girl when she told Relena that Duo was grieving in his old way. It was difficult to believe it until Duo was telling Relena a story one day, two months after the incident.

He sat in her parlor, decked out in a variety of religious symbols. Quatre even said that Duo had been going back to church, occasionally anyway, at irregular intervals, but Relena did not get any sense of peace from him. They were talking about anger, she remembered, about how it had affected people during the war, clouding their vision. They always talked about politics and the past in those days; it had been too difficult to discuss anything personal. Relena remembered asking Duo if he had ever been so angry it clouded his judgment. “Yeah,” he replied immediately with a smile, and told the story with full gestures. “I was putting up a window in the house a few days ago. I don’t know what came over me, but I got so angry I smashed it over my head. A two-hundred dollar window, Relena! It took a long time to clean up too.”

She had stared at him with a dry mouth and failing heart. He smashed a window over his head. Madness. All she could see was the rage that must have been in his eyes, the shattering bits of glass that would have cascaded around his body and cut up his skin. She had no doubt what he had been thinking about. He must have noticed her shock because he smoothly switched the subject to that of Jonathan. That had been just as impossible to talk about. That was the last day she saw Duo. They hadn’t spoken since, but she had heard that he had given up God completely and become an atheist. Quatre said something about Duo not being able to believe that Heero was going to Hell. That being unacceptable made the entirety of the religion faulty.

Relena wept on the grass. Hell. Her angel from the stars in Hell. She didn’t know what she believed about that. It was impossible to contemplate. Surely God would love Heero more than she had, enough to forgive him his hasty action. But she was twisted and tormented inside. Heero did not believe in God or in any salvation. If he thought life not worth living, would he think heaven worth taking? All she could see was his body under the ground. Inside she crumpled up, coughing and choking for air.

“Why didn’t I tell him I loved him?” she cried out at the night, and clawed her numb and shriveled hands against his grave.

But if he believed himself unloved enough to kill himself, would he have believed her if she said she loved him, believed her if she said he was lovable? She was not so sure, and her heart was too broken to feel for any tangible truth. Surely he must have known she did. She had thought it obvious. Everybody had. But maybe Heero didn’t want to believe in being loved. Maybe he wanted to die, and to be miserable enough to warrant it, he had to believe there was no way he could be happy. Was that Hell? A self-made prison of the mind certainly, but being of the mind, was it any less real? Perhaps that was all that hell was, here or in the thereafter. Maybe for some people, life went on after death, to better, happier, glorious things, and maybe for other people it just stopped where they left off. Maybe in the end, God gave everyone exactly what they wanted. If they would not accept otherwise, was there anything else to do?

She wiped her eyes, huddled in the grass and mud, breathing quietly. The sky was dark and stormy gray, but the rain was an even fainter drizzle than before, barely a cool sprinkling of rain. She felt terrible.

The roads had been slick that night.

She tried to imagine Heero losing control of the car, trying to find the breaks, shifting to a lower gear in an attempt to control his speed, teeth gritted in the effort of trying to survive an accident, but her imagination slipped more easily into an image of him letting go, leaning back, releasing the steering wheel...if not turning it sharply toward the ocean. But what if that was not the way it had been? What if in the moment it took him to realize it was too late he had changed his mind? Would such repentance be enough to rescue him? She shook her head to keep from seeing him falling through the windowshield as the car crashed into the ocean and rocks below. He had believed in her. She thought he had believed in himself. She wished for an answer.

A sense of quietness came over her and she breathed in the smell of the rain and the mud, feeling suddenly very alive, and not altogether alone.

She stood slowly, the wind blowing across her bare skin. Looking up into the rain, she searched for gaps in the clouds where patches of the night sky revealed the deep color of the eyes characteristic of the man she had loved. She found them as the rain let up slowly, dark gray masses of clouds swirling away to reveal the indigo blue of space. Stars twinkled in the heavens. There was love in that emptiness, love inherent in that hand-crafted brilliance, the sky that was the mural of color and light for all humanity, what man called heaven in reference to something they could not picture at all. Whatever it was, Heero belonged up there. Surely he had the soul-quality to realize it, to not be too proud of his misery to refuse it. And even if he didn’t, she did.

The wind swept the clouds on, and the patches of space changed, but she had seen enough of their beauty tonight. Lowering her head, she looked around her at the graves, quiet tombs embedded in the earth, wet with rain, but solid in their build. The grass was beautifully maintained, wet and dark under the night sky, but evenly cropped and lusciously colored. The wind blew her wet hair about her neck, where it clung to her face and shoulders as she stood with her head turned and his hands clenched into fists, back and shoulders straight.

“I believe in you, Heero,” she whispered to nothing, for it was too late to tell him. Besides he had known it before. Yet in saying it, she thought she heard the echo, “I believe in you.”

She shivered again and walked back to her car, wondering if she would catch a cold from tonight. Well, that was no matter. Lifting her cell phone from her purse, she searched through her speed dials, long neglected.

It was answered on the first ring.

“Noin, it’s Relena. Can I stay with you tonight?”

The surprise on the other end of the line was strangely comforting, and after a short conversation, Relena hung up and drove to the house where she had been living with Jonathan.

Opening the door without knocking, she went up to her room and packed her most precious things. She didn’t worry about alerting Jonathan to her presence; she just wanted her memories. She dug out the old teddy bear from where she had stuffed it under her dresser in a fit of shame long ago. She also packed her books and her clothes and some of the figurines and things that she had had before she met Jonathan. Everything else she left behind. She had money enough to buy new things if she needed them. She wanted nothing of this part of her life.

When she walked back down the stairs with her suitcase in hand, she felt calmer and more relaxed than she had in years. Heero was in her head still, the memories of him anyway, and the hope too. He had once told her that people could not live without hope. She knew that was true, so she would keep hoping, but in the meantime, she would do what she must with the strength he had given her to own.

When she reached the front door, the click that came from the stairs behind her was familiar. She recognized it, and something in her settled at the sound, even smiled. He had followed her. Quietly, she turned. “Goodbye Jonathan,” she said, turning to face him with a faint smile on her lips. “I came for my things. I won’t bother you anymore.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said nonchalantly. “Put your stuff down and come to bed. You can put it away tomorrow.” He had a cigarette in his hand, the smoke lifting from his lips. His eyes were ruddy and red from alcohol.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“I’m sorry about before, you know,” he said, and grinned slyly at her. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“I am making a decision, for myself, and for you too,” she replied. “It’s best, I think, for both of us, and you know why.”

He approached her with that glint in his eye, the one that used to frighten her. She wasn’t frightened anymore. Death had never frightened her until Heero showed her how horribly it could be used to hurt people. But now she understood her hope better, and wasn’t frightened anymore. “I’m going, Jonathan. I’m sorry.”

His face contorted in rage. The safety was released. She stood her ground.

“I’ll kill you,” he warned. “I told you I would.”

“I’m not afraid to die,” she said calmly. “I have my answers now. Besides, you won’t. You want me in your power. You lose that if you kill me.”

He must have seen something different about her. At that moment he must have seen she who they called the Queen of the World. For an instant he must have felt like a supplicant, pleading at the feet of an earthly goddess in her earthly power. Relena had command of all her faculties now. Quatre had once called Heero the soul of outer space, but Relena was Queen of the Earth. Whether the stars were created to decorate the sky of the Earth or the earth was created as merely one body in space, made no difference to the man and woman who represented them. Both were fated powers in their own right and would continue unchanged if the other disappeared. Jonathan was merely a man, and he must have known it fully in that instant when he faced this woman once she had recovered her memory. He must have looked at her and seen that which God desired of humanity.

He held the gun aimed at her forehead, but like all of those who came before him he did not pull the trigger. Relena, a young girl or mature woman or to whatever she might yet ascend, did not flinch. Her blue eyes did not blink and her beautiful face did not change. She felt no anger or enmity toward him, but neither was there anything else. Without even a nod, suitcase in hand, she turned her back on the man who seemed to hold her life in his hands and walked out the door. As she climbed into her car and headed for the highway she thought only of her memories and her future. People needed hope to live, and she would carry that with her, as Heero had taught her to, for Heero had seen it in her first, but she had her own strength as well, and it was that that would carry her home.