Warnings for Japanese Poetry As Told by Heero Yuy: Yaoi, 1+2/2+1, Heero POV, rambling

~ J a p a n e s e P o e t r y ------ as told by Heero Yuy ~  ......   A Gundam Wing Rambling Fic by Salamander

     He doesn’t understand just why and that’s fine. I don’t understand. Maybe I was just ready and the change was something I could handle. It seemed to shock him more than it did me when I was finally done. And I didn’t lie, it had gotten in the way. But I miss it. He knows it. He knows everything about me. And still loves me. He’s a romantic and I try for him, I do. I don’t really understand what romance is, what it can be, but he seems to appreciate all that I do tend to achieve. Maybe more than if I gave him just the commercialized version of romance, flowers and the like. I read him poetry. My poetry, but really it’s his. Before him it was the war, training, my hollow life.

     Now it is all for Duo, every word. I would have run out of it save him. Don’t think its all about love though, because it’s not. He only gives me a reason to keep writing, the subject tends to vary on whatever I happen to have to contemplate on. Which isn’t my hair as much as he thinks it is. I miss it, I miss my pants, but their exchange for others was necessary for the continuing success of the missions and I won‘t compromise. Spandex is just too out of place in society’s culture. He worries over how I feel about these changes, what they mean. He asks. I wish I could tell him, but I can’t because I’m not sure why, and that is never enough for him so he’s always wondering how I am about it.

     His hair is so important to him, I guess its difficult to get through to him that mine was just…hair. He likes it anyway. I wear a hat sometimes, he finds that irresistible, or, I believe he said saucy. I had a green bandana and that was a bit of a distraction for him. I had to stop wearing it when maintenance schedules were tight. I woke up one morning and everyone else had gone off somewhere. I wanted to finish Wing’s repairs before Duo returned and began doing everything he could think of to get me away from my ‘metal lover’, to which I always return, it’s not metal, its gundanium, and he rolls his eyes and smiles and proceeds to flirt with me like I’d really choose Wing over him. But no one was around and so I went down to the hanger and got on the scaffolding to readjust the booster settings. I was deep into the work and enjoying it when I happened to look up onto the screen I was using to monitor the hanger room, since I was between the wall and the back of my Gundam.

     The screen was moving around like I had programmed it to do and so I watched it a minute as it made the rounds and noticed a yellow, foreign object on the breastplate of Wing. Gun up, plan forming, feet ready and training already taking over my entire body in crashing wave form, I moved closer to the object, suspecting an explosive. Not so. On closer inspection I noticed a tag lying on top of the yellow-clad thing. Using the screen I zoomed in to the image and noticed a scrawling message on the paper tag.

     ‘Ro, noticed you were almost through.’ Which of course was Duo’s writing and so, almost angry that he had put me through the whole routine, I put all the equipment away and, because I was being defiant, finished all my scheduled repairs before I even touched the thing. The others came back before I was done, they passed through the hanger, said hello and went inside. Duo lingered around the feet of my mech and looked up at me. He couldn’t see the top of the breastplate from where he was standing and so he didn’t realize that I hadn’t even touched the package. He waited almost ten minutes, walking around the bottom of my suit in circles, casually, as if he knew he only had to wait and I would eventually talk to him. I climbed down when I was done, forgetting about the yellow thing lying on my suit.

    He smiled when I came down and I wanted to do more than the same to see him standing there, leaning against the metal rails, arms crossed with that smile on his face. My fiancé.

‘Like it?’ he wondered.

     I hadn’t looked at it yet I told him. He was confused I think. He never gets anything, no one ever presents him with things. The few times he had been given something he had been grateful, touched, pleased, astounded, all those things and probably more. My disinclination to jump up and find out what he had left there confused him. His smile dropped. I felt as though it had actually dropped into the pit of my stomach and smashed there, because there was a terrible aching feeling at the bottom of it that I otherwise couldn’t quite understand at the time.

‘Oh,’ he said, and then walked back into the adjoining house almost distractedly.

     I did jump onto Wing then. I leapt onto the breastplate and sat down beside the package, legs crossed and yellow thing before me. It was hard for me to pick it up. I knew it was from Duo, I knew I had nothing to worry about, as far as physical endangerment went. But mentally? I had never given him anything. Except a ring, eventually, months after the fact. It was plain, a white-silver band, very thin. It didn’t say anything and it wasn’t anything anyone would ever look at and be jealous of, or think was unmatchable. He doesn’t care at all about that. He treasures it. I know he does. It’s become like his cross to him, or his hair. I know that’s an indescribable honor, a place in his heart I feel often that I don’t deserve. Like when I finally picked up the package and found that whatever it was had been wrapped in a soft, yellow bandana. On the tag at the corner of it was a smiling face and a minute message in Duo’s undisciplined hand that said

‘Wonder what yellow will do for you.’ I smiled at that and looked down to see if maybe he had come back quietly to see me.

   He hadn’t. Disappointment mingled with the pleasure. I was worried again that this was something maybe I couldn’t handle. He only wanted to do something nice for me, but I was always wary, ‘an analyzing machine’ he called me. I pulled the bandana off the rest of the way and found a book. It was small, only about seven by five inches, but the width was at least two inches thick, and the book was bound in sturdy brown leather that smelled warm and comforting, with a cord around it so that it would shut. I wondered why he thought I would want something to read, deciding it was for the same reasons he always wanted me to listen to this music and look at those paintings and ‘get some culture’ into me. I opened the book. The first page was blank, but it was good paper. Thick and the color of a soft coffee stain with flecks of darker hues embedded in the page. The next page was blank as well. They all were.

    A blank book. For my poetry. For him. ‘ ‘Ro, noticed you were almost through.’ With the ten cent school notebook I had taken from the first school I ever resided at. I had two pages left in it and the entire appearance made it seem as though it had been through a garbage disposal. The paper cover was dog-eared and scratched and the book was ready to fall apart. This one was beautiful, long-lasting. Duo had taken time to find it, get it, wrap it, and set it here early in the morning for me to find. I admired it for a long time. He did come back and stand under me for a while. He is better at stealth than the rest of us. He’s very proud of that. He had been there for quite a time before I noticed his shadow on the wall. I picked up the bandana and book and jumped down to face him. He made no movement, but his eyes were very large and to me they shimmered. Finally, since he knows I am nothing at understanding the proper conduct for such a situation, he takes the bandana from my hand and ties it around my head carefully. He steps back to take a look.

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘What’ I want to know. It has the same effect as the green, he says, but with a different attitude. This time its brighter while the green was more mysterious in that dark kind of way, he says.

‘Oh yeah?’ I question and he loves it when I get sultry.

‘Yeah baby,’ he says and I can see just what the yellow does for him.

     I hold up the book and he understands that I don’t know what to say to thank him. But in not knowing, he knows that even if I had been one to know exactly what to say, I wouldn’t have found the words anyway. This from him, is like a ring. An assurance that he wants to hear my heart. That he will give me everything he can to make sure I will always tell him. Simply his presence will do, but he is not always sure of that in himself. A kiss is too common in this situation. He knows that and doesn’t expect one. I sit down at his feet and take out my pen for recording maintenance notes and open the book. He sits before me and watches my face, not the pen. Perhaps half an hour we are still, expect for my arm. When we finally stand and I close the book, our eyes meet and his seem bright, pleased. I take his hand and lead him to our dark, falling-apart, closet-room in the shack beside the hanger. We crawl under the worn blankets and I let him rest his head on my shoulder, I want him to.

     We are quiet for a time, simply breathing in rhythm against each other while I hold the book up and stare at it for a minute or so. Finally he brings it down in front of his chest and waits for me to begin. I start softly, reading it in Japanese to him at first, so he can hear the melody of it, the melody from him that I try to capture, that I know I will never get completely because of the complexity in him, because of the bursting rhythm. He smiles and relaxes into my voice, my chest. I only begin the English when Quatre bursts in with news of an attack. We jump up, the moment tucked away for another time.

‘I love being a bad-ass,’ Duo smiles as he grabs his gear and runs towards the hanger.

     I have to smile at that, and shake my head, already slipping into soldier mode for the fight. Duo is laughing in front of me, getting up his adrenaline, ready to make it through the explosions and the combat for another night under the blankets with my book at his side when we have read all we can and my arms around his body, trying as hard as I can to protect him from everything he never should have known about but instead has experienced himself first hand, most of the time more than once. My blackened angel, I call him. He only laughs.

‘That’s too long a nickname ‘Ro, how ’bout something with a little more of a catch to it?’ I never know what to say to that. One time I said, ‘Oh, like, Duo Maxwell-Yuy?’ He was very pleased with that response.

     I don’t want to overdo it. That’s what he thinks about, overdoing it with me, as if I could get tired of him if he were around me too often. He knows somewhere that that’s not true, but its that instinct of his that says no one will ever want him. The poetry, my only way of truly showing him how wrong that fear is, how far placed from anything even remotely glimpsed on the distant horizon of my feelings for him his fear is. He promises to believe me every time I tell him, which isn’t as often as he deserves, that would be all the time, especially considering that without him I never would have been able to even fathom thinking about saying anything remotely related. These are violent times. We know that. I love him. He knows that. This book that I hold now proves that he knows. The ring on his finger is a symbol of it. I tried to think of something better, something that would help him understand, but I am not skilled at such things concerning the romantic. He is. Or, in his own way he is. It suits us. My blackened bad-ass angel of death.

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Salamander: Get that one?

Wufei: No.

Salamander: Oh ::shocked and sad::

Wufei: Haha! This is fun! Look at the face! ::points to Salamander::

Salamander: ::beginning to snarl:: Ya know what Wufei…

Wufei: Oh mercy! ::runs::

Salamander: ::smirk::