Name: Aldiara
Email: aldiwitchie@yahoo.com
LJ
Title: no man's world
Word count: 945
sometimes you look at me as though you knew me. which is funny, really, because nobody does. yeah, I know I’m the one they get along with, but it’s like one of those brain candy novels, you’d pick it for a long and boring bus trip but it wouldn’t be the single book you’d take to a desert island. I know I’m the first one who gets invited to evenings out when we’re not on a mission, I know I’m the one who’s easy to talk to, the one most of us would prefer to share a boring night shift with (though anything boring is fast running out, and that’s not a good thing). Quatre hugs me and Trowa shakes his head at my antics and smiles. I even get the odd grudging smile out of Wu Fei, since he’s decided I’m not just a fake.
but of course I am, and strangely enough it’s you who seems to notice it. you are most likely to frown when I flash the irresistible grin, you are the one who turns without a word when I taunt you. the others tease when they see it, and I’m sure Trowa or Quatre or both have taken you aside on occasion to tell you not to be so stuck-up, I mean only well. if they have, it didn’t work. you still turn most easily from me when I’m at my most ostentatiously buoyant.
it intrigues me, but there is no time to dwell on it, and those easy evenings out between the sounds of screeching metal and the distorted faces of the dying are becoming scarce. war has ever been a breeding place for romance, it is true, but it is the desperate kind, the wild spark more rooted in the knowledge of its own brevity than in the actual… ah, fuck. this is what you do to me. you get me thinking, when it’s the last thing I want to do. why can’t you just let me smile?
but it’s in the moments like now, when the faint disapproval in your gaze across a room, the minute frown which says that is not you, and I don’t like it, it’s in these moments that I get even close. (I know I make no sense. hang on.) because I’m the only one you even bother to disapprove of. makes me fucking special, huh? and still. it’s in those little sometimes that I feel I might know you too. as someone more than the guy who doesn’t talk.
you know? it’s weird, the others tease you for that way you speak, that utterly neutral tone that doesn’t give fuck away. damn it, Yuy, you’re like a bloody robot. I think they worry, a little; I think you scare them. that’s why they turn to me, ‘cause if we were in a deck of tarot cards I’d be the joker and you might be death. nicer to look at the grin even if it’s frozen. but hey. you know what? it doesn’t bother me. because your tonelessness, your soft, cold voice without pitch or inflection, is the matrix on which I can imprint a meaning of my own. I can make each sparse phrase you toss me something secret, something real, something for me. it’s rather brilliant, I have a catalogue of meaning that you likely never dreamed of (or did you? it’s in those bloody moments when you frown at my fakeness that I think you might).
I’ll go with Maxwell, he knows the code means I choose you.
shut up means let me listen to you breathe.
concentrate on the mission means later. don’t get hurt. I need you.
status report is please tell me you’re okay.
stop grinning means be yourself. I treasure that.
idiot is love.
I have a hundred of those. I’m sure you don’t know that you ever made a hundred different noises.
a line floats somewhere, I don’t know from where. a song, a movie seen on L2, a thousand years ago, when I was as unblemished as I could be? “if this were the real world.” it keeps coming back to me, without a tune to hum. it flutters by as I hit buttons to hurl missiles, it’s louder than the music I turn on to kill. it hovers at my shoulder as you look at me, another dozens deaths behind your eyes. if this were the real world, I might not grin like a madman; I might step over there and offer a touch that you would not brush off. you might cling to me and hang on, damp lips against my ear, and say something desperate and sweet, like, I can’t take this anymore, Duo, let’s get out. but of course it’s not. for once, because that’s not the way it works. for another, because we’ll die, of course. (yeah, I know I’m scattered. what do you expect? give a guy a break). oh, probably not this week, or next week’s mission, and probably not all. but eventually. you, me, both, doesn’t matter (though if it were me, I like to imagine that you’d crack). there’s only so much luck and training, and in the end, you can’t make death your ally, no matter what secret name you give yourself. at the end of the day, death is still the stranger.
so, we are in limbo. still here, but kinda not. still real, but, you know, what’s real anyway. we float in no man’s world, waiting for luck to run out. and in the meantime?
if this were the real world, I wish you’d make me stop grinning.