Love is a Shooting Star (NC-17)

[Nightheart]

Warning: Lemons ahead.

Trowa scanned the darkness of the forest where the circus had set up camp a mile or two outside the city. The perimeter was clear. Some habit dies hard, and this was one of them. Even after two years of total peace, he still checked the perimeter every night. He looked up at the stars beating in their orbits far away and fluctuating in and out of sight due to changes in the atmosphere. The view from space of the rest of the universe was steady and unchanging; only on earth did things change with such rapidity. That was probably why he didn't really belong on earth... he never seemed to change.

He sat down beneath a tree and rested his back against the trunk, gazing out at the night sky contemplatively. Even after all this time, he felt a kinship with outer space. He was a void as well. Like the stars overhead he burned brightly, but all alone. There was his adopted family of course, but he still felt that void of detachment within him that no amount of elder sisterly protectiveness or kettles of soup could ever quite seem to fill. He just didn't feel close to anyone. He never had a hard time leaving even if there was the chance he might not come back. He never cried or felt sad walking away. His mask was still as stoic as it ever had been, and Catherine was still trying to get him to smile more. Oh, there were moments when he felt he could be like everyone else; times in the bright sunlight when everyone was cutting up and having fun laughing or playing tricks on one another that made him feel included... but inevitably the moment past and he fell back into the shadows and the habits of a lifetime soldier. He felt like sometimes he had been born on the outside of a warm room only allowed to look in through the window at the warmth and emotions that everyone else shared with one another; allowed to look in and see love, and happiness, and joy, and caring... but never to feel any of those things for himself. He tended to think of his heart as a tremendous black hole in his chest, sucking in all the light and warmth to some nether dimension never to be seen nor heard of again.

It was on nights like this when he felt the emptiness the most. It was quiet, it was tranquil, everyone else was already asleep, and he was alone. It was on nights like this when he sometimes remembered the past. His memory had been returned to him by the zero system and his own will, sometimes things were vague and shadowy, other times as clear as if he'd lived it only five minutes ago. It was on nights like this when he remembered the past, he remembered having a friend who'd saved his life and nearly destroyed it at the same time. A friend he'd walked away from a long time ago.

Suddenly a bright shooting star flared past his vision.

"Hey look, Nanashi, a shooting star," she pointed up to the night sky from where they lay out on their backs in an open field... a battlefield to be more precise.

The boy looked over at her, his face blank as to the significance of the event. The girl looked at him as if he were incredibly dense.

"My papa once told me that if you wish on a shooting star, that it'll come true within ten years," she informed him. The boy soldier refrained from pointing out that almost anything could happen in ten years, and that shooting stars were actually called meteorites.

"Make a wish Nanashi," she urged. "It'll come true."

His brow furrowed in puzzlement. A wish? He thought for a moment, but found that he couldn't think of a single thing to wish for. He looked over at the girl; she was wearing that troubled look on her face. For the past two days, ever since they'd become friends really, she'd looked like she wanted to say something. She'd even stopped him sometimes in the middle of his work, turn him to look at her with her head bowed forward and hiding behind her golden cascade of hair as she usually did, she'd open her mouth to say something but nothing would come out. She'd just shake her head and murmur, nevermind. She always looked so torn up about something. She had her eyes closed now, looking intensely concentrated on something and more troubled than usual.

"What did you wish for?" she asked him.

"I'm a soldier, I don't have any wishes," he said shortly. Then hesitantly he inquired

"What did you wish for?"

"I wished I could go home now," she said softly. Nanashi made no reply and they continued looking up at the stars. Before long Midii fell asleep curled up to him as the nearest source of warmth, he covered them both with the oversized military jacket he wore and closed his eyes. It was warm enough with the two of them. Yes, he felt very warm now.

Wish upon a shooting star? He wondered idly if anyone had ever mistakenly wished upon him when he'd come down to earth disguised as a meteor. What would he wish for? He already had everything he'd ever wanted, a place to call home, someone to protect. What else could he possibly wish for? Then he shook his head at the idea of a guy like him actually making a wish like he expected it to come true. Still, as long as he was feeling whimsical (for him that is) he might as well.

"I wish... If I could have any wish come true... I wish that this broken thing inside of me that makes me so, so different and unable to feel like other people would just, would just get fixed."

There is power within a single soul to change the entire universe. Within certain souls, such as the one who now called himself Trowa Barton, there was power enough to become a force of destiny. A force around which events unfolded, drawn to their special gravity, as if they can take fate by the threads and re-weave the fabric of future history with the power of their will. When certain souls make a wish the universe listens... and sometimes... it acts.

* * *

She appeared out of no where, just like the first time he'd ever seen her. Like a late night vision she stood there pale and ethereal in the moonlight against the backdrop of the dark forest. Her hair like spun moonbeams hid her face as it always had, her head falling forward to hide her eyes. She raised her chin and met his gaze squarely. He saw in her eyes the thing he'd always envied a bit when they'd been friends as children. Her eyes were full, she had emotion; love, hate, fire, determination. She felt, and felt deeply; time had not changed that. Her eyes were not hard or empty, but soft and caring, filled with the capacity for great self-sacrifice and true unflinching love; the kind of love people wrote about in books, the kind that looked straight at fire and darkness and death and didn't twitch a muscle. The kind that could heal a thousand hearts and still have more to give. She looked at him with her bottomless eyes filled with old knowledge and beckoned him to her. Almost as if he were dreaming, he rose and followed her.

* * *

She had been drawn to him. The force of his need calling out to her over the distances, the power of his wish had brought her to his side. She was here now, as she had always been. It was the way of nature; she felt the call of his emptiness like a palpable gravity, pulling her towards him.

The forest was dark and quiet but for the two of them, neither of them made any sound as they moved. She stopped in a grove where the moonlight shone down on the moss-soft forest ground and turned to reach for him. Wordlessly, soundlessly, she rose up on her toes and kissed him softly on the mouth. Drawn in, she could feel his darkness all around her, it was shadowy-quiet, like ice it burned with cold fire. The feeling of trying to be sucked in tugged all around her like she was standing against the current of a swiftly moving river; the vacuum of his emptiness was trying to draw her in to fill the void inside. That was not the way to heal. This would need more.

She awoke to herself before she succumbed to the gravity of the emptiness inside of him. He was holding her firmly and precisely by her shoulders, she could sense he had physical experience with the opposite sex before but the emotions had never become involved. One of his strong toned arms snaked around her waist and crushed her form to his hardened chest. He pressed harder and more demandingly on her mouth deepening the kiss. She parted her lips and molded her soft yielding curves to his hardened muscular angles.

She was responding completely without thinking and now was not the time to allow her physical self to dictate her actions. She centered herself and only when her emotions were firmly grounded did she bring her arms up around his neck and join him fully in the kiss. Part of her enjoyed the feeling of his lips against hers, the rest spiraled tendrils of her emotions out of her aura and meshed with his spirit sinking deep into the void inside of him. It was dark, it was powerful, but she could sense the ragged edges around the abyss, the wounded places that had been ignored and left untreated. They were old and scarred, lumped and ugly with years of grief and horror piled atop one another layer upon layer; each making the chasm larger, wider, deeper. A wound if left open and untreated would fester and spread, poisoning the flesh of the body. So it is that a wound of the heart left to rot would poison the soul. That was what she was here for now. There was something deep within him, a spark. She could feel it, just beneath the surface, hidden behind the void. A light that shone in the darkness, like a beacon undimmed by sorrow and war that struggled like it was trying to break free.

<But be patient,> she told it without sound or words. <I will release you from the chains that you yourself have made.>

His heart was not destroyed, as he seemed to think, but hidden like a light in a locked room only awaiting the key to be turned in order to shine in a place the world and himself could see it. It was sad that he had given up on himself but she knew he was beautiful. That was why she loved him, why she had always loved him. She could feel the self that lay in shadowed corners he didn't know he had.

Trowa wasn't sure what passion and instinct had taken over, but for once he wasn't fighting it. He was tired of fighting. He was a nameless soldier who had been on the battlefield since the day he was born, but something about this night, something about the woman who appeared like an apparition conjured by the moonlight out if this air that drew him, magnet-like into a place where he felt oddly warm. It was more than the electrical tingle fissioning up his spine and out along his body when he lowered his lips to hers. He was familiar with carnal lust, the feeling of being together and alone at the same time even while in the heights of pleasure. He was familiar with desire, the hunt of a wild creature for a moment of delight. He knew those things well, but this was different. He wanted her in a way that was completely different from any way he'd known until now, he wanted to take her over, he wanted to move beneath her skin. He wanted to fill her like water and feel her filling him.

He pressed her closer to him, slightly irritated at their clothes for being a barrier between them as he pulled her down with him to the forest ground softened by moss and leaves and grass. His touch was gentle as he stroked her hair away from her face and brushed a thumb across one smooth cheek. His breathing had quickened as his heart rate sped up when he reached for the wraparound shawl she wore to ward off the very slight chill of the air. he slid it over her shoulders and then pulled her to him. Burying his face in her smooth skin scented lightly if vanilla and her own soft unique scent he ingrained it in his memory. As long as he lived, he would remember exactly the way she smelled and exactly the way she looked in the moonlight. He began trailing kisses up from her collarbone to her jawline, taking little tastes and trailing her smoothness against the hyper-sensitive skin of his lips.

As he worked his way through touch along her skin she worked her ephemeral way inside of him. SHe gathered the feelings she had felt for him for so long and pushed them at the barriers he had created inside of himself, the wall of ice that had created the void. She had a heart that was filled with emotions, joy, pain, love, sorrow; she felt them all and she felt them completely. If she could just resonate with him. She responded to his caresses over the white silk of her dress, as his hands roamed down from her shoulders to her hips.

She felt his passion, it flared up suddenly out of the darkness as she bent down to kiss him on the lips again. His passion which offered the key to the ice walls he'd built... if she had the courage to take it. There was the chance that when she surrendered his void could consume her completely. But if she didn't there would be no hope.

Seizing hold of her courage she ran her fingers through his hair and pressed her silk-clad body closer to his. His inner passion ran like white-hot fire under a sheet of ice as he slipped his tongue to explore her mouth. It wasn't enough. He rolled her beneath him to crush her soft body to his frame, trying to imprint the feel of her arms around his chest for all time on the pages of his memory. His heart pounded erratically and he felt like the universe was holding its breath, as if he had been waiting for this single moment without even knowing it, as if he had been searching for her without realizing it and now that he'd found her...

He buried his face in her hair, breathing in her scent and tasting along her collarbone as he moved the straps of her white silk summer dress out of the way. Raising his lips to recapture hers once more he made a small noise of inquiry to which the reply was more action than sound. Having been given permission he caught the tiny head of the zipper and slid it down revealing the creamy expanse of flesh beneath the blanched white of her dress. He wasn't certain why he responded to her touch with such urgency but something in him wanted to be gentle; she looked so fragile in contrast to his lean lanky form. His work-roughened and calloused hands slid over her skin, which was far smoother and softer than anything he'd ever known. With quick nimble fingers she unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off him, followed shortly after by the suspenders clipped to his pants. Wordlessly she sat back to admire for a moment before smoothing her hands down his back and kissing the area under which his heart presided. He felt his body suddenly tighten in response and he felt oddly light and warm. Like he was suddenly filled with sunshine.

So long. She'd waited for so long for this moment for him to call to her, now that it was there she didn't ever want it to end. She felt dizzy and drunk on the sensations; a culmination of a lifetime of love. She closed her eyes to concentrate on memorizing his scent, the feel of his skin, his weight crushing her to him. She didn't want to miss a single feeling but nonetheless, there was something more he needed from her.

"To love was to sacrifice." She had lived all of her life believing that tenet. She had sacrificed to save the ones she loved, even when they did not ask it of her. She had sacrificed her childs innocence to the battlefield in order to protect her beloved family and she had given Nanashi her cross, her only means of protection, that day... she had expected to die in the attack, by intent she had exchanged her life for his. In that moment she realized she was willing to give up everything for him. She wasn't afraid, she would give him her heart, give him all of her so that he might be free.

With that resolution, came action. The spark between then roared into a bonfire encouraged by desire and passion. She allowed him to draw even more of herself into him as his kisses deepened. It was almost exactly as if he were drinking her in, but she was where she needed to be. She pressed at his inner icy barriers, the walls and shields he had erected to seal away his heart, she pushed at it with pure kindness, unwavering devotion, and true love. The ice slowly began to melt, with soft kisses she smoothed the emotional scar tissue until it was white and fading instead of lumped, ugly and pulsing, feeding off itself and growing like a living organism within him.

<What is this?> he wondered vaguely. He felt warm... so warm. The desire between them like a living fire, like electricity traveling along his skin, was nothing unusual but it came accompanied by a pleasant bone-melting warmth. He felt so warm; all pain, all heartache, all despair, all misery felt so distant as to feel unreal. Everything bad that he carried within himself seemed to melt and disintegrate. He didn't know what was going on exactly or why he felt so different, but he wanted so much more.

Unconsciously he murmured her name as he closed the final distance separating the two of them and with a moan sank inside her and became one. She enveloped him like an ocean of light and warmth and he never wanted to see the shore again. His temperature rose, the white hot heat that had replaced the blood inside of his body seemed to burn its way outward under his skin. With each wave he crashed into he felt the fire building and building.

As he joined their bodies, she joined her soul to his and blasted away the last if the ice around the vortex created within, his own personal darkness. She flowed into him like water, filling every crevice but the chasm was too vast! All of her light was going to be sucked in, he'd consume her! She gathered all of her precious feelings to her, murmuring his name as he slid inside of her again and again. His heartbeat pounded within her louder and louder, she felt her light grow with the intense pleasure of their repeated unions in a rhythm as old as time as she resonated deeply within him. They were one, one pulse, one beat; their separate frequencies locked and amplified. As he cried her name in ecstasy and agony she spread her arms wide, a golden light spreading out around her like the wings of an angel and leaped off the cliff and plunged herself into the heart of his darkness, the swirling, shifting, sucking shadows that tried to destroy and devour all light in his soul. She fell, falling falling falling flying deep inside the formless shadows that pulled at her, she flew like a shooting star light streaming out behind her. She flew towards his heart, the center of emotions he'd long ago buried to keep living in the horror of war day in and day out for as long as he could remember, she flew towards it past the great yawning, grasping, gravitating void that tried to pull her in and make her disappear. She saw it then, a light like a tiny sun shining like gold at the sea of shadow. She could feel him there, the call of her resonance was centered there, like a melody over the hill that grew louder the closer she got. She reached out her metaphorical arms and met his center in an embrace bringing Love, like fire and sunshine, like stars and like flame around to enshroud him, to wrap him in pure and endless emotion. The chains that had once held him, the chains he had once made, faded away and there was a burst like a supernova as the world shattered into a thousand points of white. They fell together into golden light, the rush of the ocean and the roar of a tidal wave breaking through them and slowly, slowly ebbing away leaving behind a tender golden glow.

Trowa felt so complete, so wonderfully whole as he closed his eyes and pressed her closer to him. He was never letting go, never. He knew he couldn't stop time but if it had been within his power he knew he would have stayed there in that one moment of perfect beauty forever. He knew now what pure and true love was, he could feel it inside of him, something was different...

<Like spring thaw,> he thought distantly, wrapping his arms around her completely and drawing her supine to him. <Like all of the things that were frozen inside of me have melted and everything is trickling back to the places they're supposed to be.> An odd whimsy, but in the perfection of this place and this time untouched by such things as reality, he could almost believe it was magic. He closed his eyes, his last thought before sleep overtook him and dragged him into sound slumber was that he was never letting go.

* * *

He woke to bight sunlight streaming into his eyes from the bedroom window of his one room trailer. He was tucked away in his bed, still fully clothed from the day before. He glanced frantically around, disoriented. How was he here? He'd fallen asleep with her, in the forest last night. He couldn't be here in his trailer fully clothed and alone. He searched the crevices of his familiar surroundings one more time but they remained the same, no one mysteriously showed up from one of the shadows or stepped out of the closet or shower-room.

<A dream?> he thought reluctantly. He didn't want to believe it, but the evidence was clear. He'd fallen asleep last night in his trailer and no mysterious angel-woman from his past had appeared before him for a night of love and passion. It had all been a fantasy. Oddly though, something within him protested, and protested hard. He flashed back to the scent of vanilla and lilacs and a cascade of moonlight trickling against his skin and silking against his hands.

It had been real, all of it; his heart told him it had been real no matter what his intellect (the sole thing by which he had been living up until this point) told him must be so. For one night he had known love so strong and bright that it blazed through the darkness in his heart like a shooting star. It had banished all that held him down and returned to him something he had thought lost long ago. He smiled; his first real true smile in a very long time. Today was going to be a good day.

* * *



"Forgiveness? You live on forgiveness?"

"Yes."

"Well, thank you for your help, without you it would have been just the same as all of those countless other times; he would not have been able to see me no matter how I try to comfort him. Wait, I didn't sacrifice my light to earn his forgiveness... I did it because I love him... why did you help me?"

"The forgiveness I desired was yours. You needed to do this in order to forgive yourself,? Forgiveness replied. "Now there is nothing more that binds you to this world. Come, it is time to go Midii."

"But I still love him! I wanted to be with him always!"

"And you always will be," Forgiveness reassured Midii.

"I see," she said nodding in understanding. She laid a last ephemeral kiss on the lips of her beloved and disappeared in a blaze of light no one would see.



The End



Authors Note: There you have it, my first posted lemon! I know the ending seems a little confusing but it was the basis for the entire fic. Pretty cool ne? Well here you are, as promised... one lemon. I tried to keep it tasteful, I'm not really good at the whole carnal smut stuff so it ended up being mostly metaphorical emotions battling and stuff. I apologise for errors in spelling and grammar I wrote it on notepad in two big rushes so I didn't do any editing on the last part. I want to get it posted for you. So here it is and I will call it...



Love Is A Shooting Star



Get it? It's the Trowa image song, isn't that clever? *executes Naga laugh* P.S. I?m a little nervous about this one, so please review.!