The ball was filed with people, and Heero Yuy could name every one of them. He had to be able to because any unknown quantity could pose a risk to the woman this was all being held for. As Relena made the rounds to various cliques of dignitaries, she seemed distinctly at home. It was the world she had grown up in, so it came as no surprise to Heero that she functioned so well. He was never really sure if these events were pleasant respites from an unforgiving job, or simply another extension of the front Relena put up in what seemed a continuous effort to maintain balance in the political world. This was the Relena he knew best, who he understood, and incidentally this was the Relena he liked least.

Sometimes, when she was giving a speech, he would see her in his mind’s eye and then he would see himself – shooting her again and again until her white dress suit was dyed red, already dead and yet he would continue to shoot. He told himself what he didn’t like was the job, but in some ways she was the job now.

At the same time, he knew that what he looked at was not the woman he obsessed over, but a social construction made for the convenience of a world starving for leadership. Sometimes he couldn’t separate the two aspects, and in his confusion other emotions would leak through. He had hoped that in time they would fade, just like the memories he barely recalled about past weeks or years, but instead they got more intense.

He would watch her smile to a young diplomat, and suddenly he would find he had punched a wall until his knuckles opened. Calmly, as he bandaged his hand, he would remind himself that it wasn’t his Relena that smiled for that man, but the other one. Somehow that’s how the delineation of her character played out in his mind: his, or not his. There was nothing that ever brought him the thrill of joy at possession than that woman. It was only right that she was his. Hers was the first name on his lips as he woke from every dreamless sleep, and she had moved mountains to keep herself close to him. Wasn’t that enough acknowledgment of his claim?

The other gundam pilots knew of his obsession and for a while they worried about it. After a time their worry seemed to fade along with his feelings, but really he just got better at hiding it. Barton, slightly closer to understanding Heero’s thought process than the others, never lost his caution. Sometimes he even offered to take over the position of personal bodyguard in place of Heero in what had become a signal to Heero that Barton remembered. For his part, Heero respected the other pilot’s canniness but no one would take his job over their dead body.

Never his dead body. Theirs.

In his mind, abandoning Relena to the protection of someone else was the same as condemning her to death. The only person who had a right to kill her was him, and it was a right he would guard jealously. In the first year or two as her bodyguard he used to ask himself if he would kill her if she wavered in her ideals. Would that render what had passed between them void? And then he tried to imagine himself pulling the trigger. It was easy enough to picture. The only problem was that as soon as he saw himself kill her, he always left one bullet in the gun for himself as well. It was the way it had to be. Her existence was intrinsically tied to his. So long as she was out there he could keep going.

That was when he knew that even if she decided that total war was the real path to peace, he would follow her. He would just as quickly take up a gun and kill in her name as others would for God or country. In some ways she was both to him. Wherever she was, so was he, and he practically revered her. The perfect way she acted, spoke, dressed, talked – all added up to something that was distinctly Relena and it drew others to her just as it drew him. People still sometimes bowed to her when they saw her, or asked her to give them her blessings as if she were some holy figure. Of course he wouldn’t let them near her, but she always looked bothered by their requests.

She had never asked for the job, there simply had been no one else suitable to take up the mantle.

Heero watched Relena take a seat out on the deck and he went to watch her from the shadows outside to be closer to her. She pulled pin after pin out of her hair, letting it fall down over her shoulders, and regarded the fog outside in a contemplative manner. At once Heero felt distanced from her, and more aware of his jealous desire to take her away and lock her in a tower away from anyone else. Right now she was his Relena. His. She was unreachable, as always, but all the more beautiful because of it.

“What time is it?” She asked it into the night, rubbing the bridge of her nose in an attempt to ease the pain in her head. That Heero was there was a foregone conclusion.

“1:18” A.M., she had been schmoozing for at least four hours.

“Tell Quatre to make my excuses. I’m turning in for the evening.” She rose, looking straight at him with tired eyes. As Heero melted out of the shadows and started back in, he saw Relena leaning over the balcony to snap a twig off of a bush a little ways below. True to his expectations, she overbalanced, but was saved from an embarrassed trip to the dry cleaners by his firm grip on her waist.

“Be more careful. I can’t be everywhere.” He wished he could. He delivered her message to Winner and returned to the balcony. With a hiss of indrawn breath he registered the presence of a young man holding Relena’s hand and saying something earnestly to her. She nodded, then shook her head, then withdrew her hand. Heero strained to hear what she said, even as he plotted the maiming of this opportunistic fool.

“I’m sorry, there is no room in my life for anything as decadent as a relationship. Now excuse me.” Her standard answer. With a glare that left the young man cringing, Heero strode onto the balcony and got their attention. Triumph again, as Relena rejected yet another advance, and even if it was conceited Heero thought it was because of him. The young man beat a hasty retreat.

Alone now, just the two of them. The way it should be.

She looked out into the fog, shivering as it slowly turned into a mist of drizzling rain. Fiddling with the twig still clutched in her left hand, now denuded of bark from earlier ministrations to it, Relena leaned against the railing facing away from Heero and shivered. Considering how many people were still so close to them, being just past the curtains and indoors, it was a deceptively private moment. After a little while standing in the rain, Heero considered encouraging Relena to go to bed as she had planned. This couldn’t be good for her health in that thin dress. The snap of the twig made Heero start a bit, and Relena tossed it into the night. She turned to look at him, beaded by the water on her hair and clothes.

“Would you die for me?” Her eyes looked bright, even fevered.

“Yes.”

“Would you kill for me?”

“Yes.”

She already knew this, and yet the questions came again. With no other gauge for his feelings, this would have to do for an expression of his devotion. Why did she ask him this, time and again, when she knew the answers? This is part of what made his Relena so enigmatic, as the why was always left open to his interpretation.

At once her expression mellowed and a tired smile edged at the corners of her mouth. In a surprisingly gallant gesture, Heero offered his arm to escort Relena back in. It was surprising because of the unconscious signal he knew it would send to force Relena back into her political face. He didn’t do it for her, but in his own defense against the person she was now. There was no exact protocol for stolen moments like these with her, and he didn’t trust himself not to ruin everything.

What that nebulous “everything” contained he chose not to examine. He felt he got a little closer to understanding with each passing month, but it was still far enough away not to give him too much discomfort.

Relena placed her cold damp hand on his arm. Before they reentered the ballroom, she briefly leaned her head against his shoulder before straightening her posture once more and affixing her neutral conversational expression for the gauntlet of people she would undoubtedly face.

The way they were was enough. . . for now.