{{ Wufei’s thoughts }}
(( Treize’s thoughts ))
Lyrics: “Limelight” - Rush
The figure on the hard bunk bed shifted as the door hissed open and a rectangle of soft yellow light fell upon him, silhouetting a slender form. He smiled.
“You came back,” he said, sitting up. The figure stepped in, allowing the door to hiss closed and plunging the room into darkness once more.
“I did,” the figure replied simply, coolly, hesitating a moment. Then it rushed to the arms that came up to receive him. “I missed you, Treize. I wish we hadn’t had to fight…”
“I wish the same, Wufei, my dragon.”
They were silent for a moment, each aware that this might be that last time they embraced like this. Then…
“Does this have to change everything, koi?”
Treize held the Gundam pilot a little closer. “No, dragon. It doesn’t have to change.”
“I’m glad.”
“But it does mean that we need to have a talk. I think that the war clouded our opinions of one another and we need to get it straightened out before we let this proceed any farther,” the OZ commander said, stroking Wufei’s back soothingly.
Treize leaned back into the pillows, letting the other’s weight settle onto him. Wufei’s head was nestled trustingly into the juncture of Treize’s shoulder and neck, arms wrapped tightly around the older man’s body, quivering slightly.
(( You’re afraid of nothing, my dragon. Nothing but change… And I don’t know how to comfort you, because life is change. I have not had the challenges that you have had: my life has been all changes, most good, some too quick for me to keep up with and yours has been changes that hurt. ))
Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel,
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.
“Do the others know, dragon?”
“About… us? No… not yet… How am I supposed to tell them? I don’t know them well enough to say whether or not they would accept it or not.”
“And yet you fight alongside them, and they with you, each putting their lives into your hands and vice versa. Trust like that should cross all bounds.”
“I fought with them because I had to. Yes, I trust them… To an extent…”
“You know what they say, after all. ‘All’s fair in love and war.’”
“I hardly think that person had our relationship in mind when they said that.” Wufei was being sarcastic, he knew.
“I don’t think that, in all of history and all the wars in history, we would be the only ones to find ourselves in this position.”
Wufei looked up, an almost feline smile on his bold features. “Which position, mine on top of you or yours under me?”
Treize chuckled, deftly flipping them on the narrow bunk and pinning the Chinese boy. The tiny smirk Wufei wore was just too much: Treize lowered his head and kissed his dragon, tongue gently asking and receiving access.
“Care to restate that?” he asked when they broke.
“Not a bit of it,” came the reply, saucy and insolent. Treize laughed again, settling himself down again and hoping that Wufei did not decide to press his advantage over him: if he did there would be no way the discussion would ever get started. And it was necessary: the politician felt as though he was walking a razor’s edge tightrope over a pit of daggers. Carrying his love.
{{ It’s strange, love. We should have been enemies. We were enemies. And we are lovers now. I remember the day we first met…}}
The ships came into view: Wufei ignited the trident that was his main weapon and sent Shenlong to the surface, landing smoothly on the ship. A few swift strokes dismantled it along lines the craft was never meant to take and he fired the rockets to lift off from the deck of the sinking vessel. A second carrier was about to meet the same fate when a motion caught his eye just a second too late: an OZ Leo, mounted on the catapult, crashed into Shenlong and tumbled him into the sea. For a split second the power inside Nataku flickered: he would have to check carefully for damages. Then the Leo’s engines hauled the two of them to the surface, where its own beam saber would be operable. He removed the arm, noticing a smaller ship, a yacht with no guns at all, moving into the fray. Undaunted, the Leo’s pilot fought on with the shield to block what could be blocked… and then stopped as the yacht sounded a horn.
“Is that a challenge or an invitation?” he asked no one in particular, watching the figure inside the office rise from an elegantly carved desk and walk to a wall, picking out a long rapier. “You’d better be Treize.” Not waiting for the Leo to make the next move, he jumped ship, sending the extendable Dragon’s Head ahead of him as a pathway into the office, not really caring about the damage it caused. He grabbed his katana from under the pilot’s seat and jumped up on top of the arm, running along it fleet-footed…
He was fully confident in his abilities. Before Meiran’s death he had been a scholar: under Master O he had received training in combat with or without mobile suits and Master O was a master swordsman.
Cast in this unlikely role,
“I’m Chang Wufei,” he stated defiantly to the man who now stood his ground, tapping the blade of his sword gently against a gloved palm.
Ill-equipped to act,
“I am Treize Khushranada,” the leader of OZ replied in turn.
With insufficient tact,
They touched swords.
One must put up barriers
Step, parry, strike. Wufei jumped the stroke and pushed off the wall…
{{ No, the angle is wrong! }}
…and the tip of Treize’s sword came to rest against the skin of his neck, just a hair away from drawing blood.
He was humiliated! Not even Master O had ever defeated him this quickly, not even when he was first learning the weapon! His only consolation was that the pilot who had come with him was not there to see it, but there was a woman now standing there in a maroon coat, eyeing him as though she would very much like to be the one holding Wufei at swordpoint. “Kill me,” he demanded.
To keep oneself intact.
“What are you thinking about, koi?”
“Our first meeting.”
“On the yacht?”
“Yeah.”
Living in the limelight
The universal dream,
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation, the underlying theme.
“I see.”
The second time they had met came to Treize’s mind, bringing a smile to his face.
The noise, slight as it was, roused Treize. He was a light sleeper and even in a military base he did not think he would be entirely safe from an attack by the Gundams.
Living in a fisheye lens,
Actually, that worried him more than anything else. A military base would be a magnet for an attack by all five machines, rather than by just one pilot. Just that one pilot, the Chinese boy who had haunted his work and his dreams for the past two weeks since their encounter on the yacht.
Or it could be that an attack by just this one pilot without his Gundam worried him more. Because Treize knew that, if he saw the young man who called himself Chang Wufei just one more time, there would be no going back.
In grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt against the lingering chill of the British winter night, Treize slipped out of bed and behind the door, gun in hand. Whoever it was had to be damn good to get past Lady Une and they were unlikely to find him in a good mood. With his rather busy schedule he did not have a lot of time to sleep and therefore very much disliked being disturbed when he could get some rest.
Caught in the camera eye,
(( There is one person who could get away with it… ))
The door opened. A slight and very familiar figure, one that had burned itself into his memory a thousand times over in the eternity of their two-week separation, ghosted into the room, then instantly spun to face him.
(( Shut up! Don’t even think the name… ))
Both found themselves staring down twin black gun barrels at one another.
(( Chang Wufei. ))
Treize forced a laugh through his surprise, lowering his handgun. The Chinese pilot’s brow furrowed.
“Well, I have to say, you’re a great deal better than Romefeller’s trained assassins. They keep trying to get rid of me for some odd reason or other.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Wufei said sarcastically, lowering his own weapon.
I have no heart to lie,
“Mind telling me why you’re here? You’ve gotten past Lady Une, unless she knows and was letting you by. Although she would have challenged you had she thought I was in any kind of danger.” In no mood to be tactful, even if it was Chang Wufei who had disturbed his night’s rest, Treize watched the flare of carefully controlled anger in the jet-black eyes that fixed on him.
I can’t pretend a stranger is
“Actually, yes. I do mind.”
“You’re not going kill me outright. That’s not your way.”
“Why not?” Wufei’s words were intimidating, but the politician caught the tiniest flash, well-hidden and stamped out swiftly yet visible to a knowing eye, of self-doubt. Treize’s words rang true. “You’re armed.”
(( Laying down my gun or handing it over to him would feel too much like cowardice to him: he’d likely shoot me outright for it. No, but it would be considered an affront to his honor and I’m already in enough hot water over that. )) He was accustomed to knowing something about his opponent, anything that might help decide what their next move might be. With the furious Gundam pilot standing before him, though, the practiced politician could find nothing that might indicate whether the words he was about to speak were the right ones for the situation or not. He took the plunge.
“Because you have too much honor in you.”
Wufei stiffened just a touch. His finger tightened on the trigger. (( Shit. ))
The weapon disappeared.
“Very good,” the pilot said tightly.
A long-awaited friend.
“What are you smiling about, Treize?”
“Second meeting.”
Wufei laughed. “Still a little sore about that?”
Treize gave his lover a mock scowl. “Go ahead, laugh it up. I’m surprised you’re not the one who’s still a little sore.”
Wufei laughter a little harder. “That did turn out to be an interesting night. And an even more interesting morning.” Lady Une had come in to wake Treize and her jaw dropped to find her commanding officer already very much awake and cradling a very much asleep Gundam 05 in his arms.
“I told her not to breathe a word of it to anyone or I’d shoot her myself. Sometimes Lady Une gets to be the mother hen type.” Wufei tried unsuccessfully to hide his laughter at the very idea. “What was going through your mind when you climbed the window trellis?”
The Gundam pilot stopped laughing. “I was angry. Humiliated twice in one day by the same man. It was my last attempt to try to prove myself worthy of Nataku.”
“Your wife?”
The question was acknowledged with silence.
“What was going through your mind when we fought at Libra?”
A longer silence. Wufei would not meet Treize’s eyes.
All the world’s indeed a stage
“I had to make it believable for the others…”
And we are merely players,
“…so I used that anger from our second meeting.”
“I see. I had thought as much, but I did not know for certain.”
Performers and portrayers,
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage.
“This whole time we’ve been together, what has been your chief fear?”
An unexpected question from Wufei and it caught him off guard. “I would not be anything less than truthful with you, my dragon, and you know this.” Wufei was silent, but a little smile touched his face. “Someone finding out about us. Besides Lady Une, that is. My life is so out in the open and yours is as well, by necessity as one of the infamous Gundam Pilots. My superiors, had they found out, would most likely have executed both of us.”
He paused. “No. Not entirely true. My second-greatest fear. My greatest fear was that I would lose you.”
Wufei snuggled a little closer to the older man. “I can only imagine how many people would have killed to have things as easy as you did growing up.”
“Easy? Wufei, you know as well as I do that an easy life is not life, it is a mockery for those not strong enough to take on the real thing.”
They shared a chuckle over that one: it was a debate they had had several times and it was usually rather short-lived. It reminded Treize of a song he had heard once. Only once, since it wasn’t the type of music he normally listened to. But the lyrics of the chorus had caught at him and he recalled them now, singing very softly,
Living in the limelight
The universal dream,
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation, the underlying theme.
“I did not know you like that song.” Wufei was looking at him with open surprise. Even now, it amazed Treize how well he was able to hide his emotions with nothing at all, sometimes confounding even his politician’s mind by making it dig for what was not there. “I am not sure why, but it is one of Duo’s favorites.”
Treize recalled the meeting with the other four Gundam Pilots, in front of the six battered and cooling mobile suits parked on the flight deck of MO-II. One by one they had introduced themselves: cold and battle-hardened Heero Yuy, distant Trowa Barton, gentle Quatre Winner and the maniac Duo Maxwell. “That one is quite a contradiction.” He’d had incredible energy for one just out of a last-ditch battle to save the planet. Wufei snorted.
“You caught him on a bad day. Tired.” Treize winced and Wufei chuckled. “Yeah. And I had to put up with that for weeks.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No grudges.”
Living in the limelight
The universal dream,
For those who wish to seem.
“Treize, koi?”
“Dragon?”
“Do you think it can still work?”
Treize smiled.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation, the underlying theme.
“Yes,” he murmured against Wufei’s fine golden-brown skin, letting sleep reclaim him and the Chinese pilot. “Yes, I think we can make it work. Stay with me.”
The real relation, the underlying theme.