Category: Continuance, Post-Waltz, UCPA-verse
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Note: I originally had this posted another another name, but decided to repost it. If you have any questions and/or comments, feel free to review/pm/message/email me from either account.
It’s Christmas again. Twenty two years down the road and it’s Christmas again. The tree is in the living room, in the corner opposite the television, the couch pulled half a foot to the side to make some extra room for it, the shoulder-high book shelf dragged a few feet down the other wall, out of place, but with enough room for the large Fraser Fir tree. It’s a good eight feet, a couple feet taller than him, the top of it mere centimeters away from scrapping the ceiling. In fact, there’s already a green line on the white paint where it dragged across when it first put it up and realized he’d have to cut a few inches off that last nub so it would fit the way it was suppose to.
White lights wind around it giving off a pleasant glow. There aren’t too many of them, but it’s not quite sparse either. He likes the look of it. The lights aren’t the only thing on it, of course. He did that for a few years, he likes the way the it makes the silver green needles of the tree look, likes the simplicity of it. But a few years ago, when Stacy picked up her new job and she was having trouble getting to the elementary school to pick up the twins, he offered to help her out. He never really got the glitter out of his car completely, and now he spends enough time with the kids that it doesn’t really matter. What did matter, however, was the paper chain links that they started bringing home in December. Small circles of brightly colored paper linked together in a variety of different lengths, and the last day of school before Christmas break, they had him link all of them together, everything that they had collected and brought home over the month, and twine the entire thirty five foot long paper chain around the tree before their mom got back.
It had been a precarious event. Their tree already had lights and decorations on it, and twisting the paper chain, despite it’s light weight and small rings, was a difficult job, making sure that nothing fell off or broke in the process. The twins screaming with joy and running around his legs didn’t help the process. In the end they got them up and when he got back that night, he pulled out some craft paper from his desk – you couldn’t babysit six year old girls without having crafts around – and made a few chains for himself. Not many, and no more than two feet, but once he was finished laying them on the branches of his tree he was more than satisfied with the difference it made. Since then, he’d been doing it every year.
June and May found out about it, and this year when they started making paper lanterns for the threes, they started giving him two (one from each of them) every day when he picked them up from school. Even though he only got them Tuesdays and Thursdays, he already had so many of his own that he didn’t know what to do with them. Some days they gave him more than two, something along the lines of ten or twelve. It didn’t help that practically the very first day the paper lanterns appeared in their hands, they demanded they come to his house and assure their lanterns were put in the correct place. Two times a week, no matter how many they had, they came and put them on his tree and proceeded to make more as they ate carrots and raw broccoli and giggled madly in his living room waiting for their mom to come home.
Every evening he took half of what they put up down so there would be room for the next day’s shenanigans.
Today, however, the house was quiet. It was the twenty third and Stacy and the girls had gone to visit their father, John, at Renwall Penatentry where he had been for the last three years after being involved in a police department scandal. The man claimed to be innocent and there was little evidence that actually tied him to what had happened, but his own partner had been the leader of the entire operation – stealing from evidence files and messing up trails in order to get money from those they could get off. The jury just couldn’t believe that he didn’t know what his partner was doing. Fifteen years in prison. He’d get out when his girls were eighteen, graduating from high school and leaving for university.
Some days Stacy went to visit her husband by herself and the girls would spend the day at his house, laughing and playing and enjoying themselves. But now it was the holidays and they had all gotten dressed and loaded up in the car and went together to go see him. Stacy tried to make the visiting days fun and exciting, to associate good things with memories of their father, even if they had to go to prison to see him. So they would go out for a fancy brunch and then visit him in the morning, then to lunch and perhaps another visit later in the evening if they could. They wouldn’t be back until after dinner, maybe later if they went to a movie as well.
So today he was on his own. There wasn’t much to do, he’d finished all the decoration in the house, put the row of white lights up on the porch nearly a week and a half ago. The warm scent of spiced cinnamon flowed through the living room, seeping into the dining room and kitchen, making the house smell like Christmas. He looked forward to having a fire later in the day, but he could never justify starting one any earlier than three or four because it just seemed a little ridiculous to have the fireplace lit in the middle of the afternoon.
He’d spend Christmas on his own this year, again, open the few presents the others sent him in the morning, then spend the morning in front of the fireplace – because it was alright to light it early on Christmas days, only if it was rainy and gray, which was almost a guarantee. Around eleven he would start cooking. This year it was going to be Duck, fantastic and golden, stuffed with something homemade, nestled on the table with mashed potatoes and sweet potato French fries, crispy green beans and a lush salad. Stacy and the girls would knock on the door around six with some divine concoction of desert held delicately in Stacy’s hands. They’d eat and laugh and get so full they had to lay back in their seats and burp every few minutes to relieve the pressure. The girls would fall asleep on the couch watching a Christmas movie and he’d help Stacy carry them back home and nestle them into bed.
Christmas was a good day. It was always suppose to have been a good day, but since the end of the war twenty years ago it got new life injected into it.
At the beginning, the first few years following the war, they all made an effort to get together. Quatre or Relena would host a Christmas reunion. They would all stumble in his door on Christmas Eve, enjoy the day and evening together. The next morning they would exchange presents, small, awkward things, they hadn’t known each other very well, for all the time that they spent fighting together. Christmas night was an event, a large party celebrating the end of the war, dinner and dancing, a ball with women in colorful gowns and men in tuxedoes.
Seven Christmases passed like that, large and lavish parties, getting together and chatting, becoming true friends. He joined the United Colony Prevention Agency in March of the eighth year, feeling like he needed to do something more than scrap yard work. He was place in intelligence, an undercover agent, always moving, searching, looking. It was a hard, stressful life, and after seven years of living in a peaceful world he had almost forgotten what life had been like during the war. Being the UCPA brought it all back in a thrilling way, in a way that made him feel like he was alive again.
He missed Christmas of the eighth year and he didn’t realize how much he enjoyed the time together with the others until the 25th rolled by and he was by himself in the middle of some shit hole colony, covered in dirt and grime and digging his way through the criminal underworld, trying to figure out if there was any viable threat. A week later when the fireworks went off in Cinq Kingdom and the New Year count down completed, he was just crawling his way onto a shuttle to go home. Home, at the time, was a temporary apartment he was leasing on G14. When he got back he had some packages waiting for him and a card from Quatre expressing how sorry he was that there had only been four of them at Christmas.
The next Christmas wasn’t any better, but he did manage to make it. Another UCPA mission over the holidays, one he worked hard at to get finished and written up so he could make it to Christmas. He still ended up missing half of Christmas day, showing up in time for the party that started at seven. He’d been carrying around his invitation ever since he got it in the mail three weeks prior – earlier than anyone else, he was sure, but Quatre knew he wasn’t home often and seemed to error on the side of caution. A rented tuxedo was waiting in his hotel room, though he still didn’t quite remember when he’d had the time to make the calls and arrange it all.
Walking up the steps and into the building had felt surreal. He’d been with the Agency for almost two years and had barely spoken to anyone, a few emails here and there, but undoubtedly no phone calls. He was always out in the field and a call was just plain stupid. But he’d made the walk up in his clean pressed suit and slightly flushed face, a slight limp in his left leg from being pushed off the roof of a building a few days before. The other guy looked worse though, he was sure if anybody took the time to dig him up, he’d look a lot worse.
The invitation was tucked into his breast pocket, crinkled and torn, dull with sweat and ground down to the fibers from having been at the bottom of his shoe for a little over two weeks, and the man at the door who took it gave him a short look for it, inspecting him closely, as though debating whether to let him in.
Quatre spotted him right then, wide smile spreading across his face, he walked out of the front entry and into the crisp winter air to take him in a warm, friendly hug and led him inside. That had been a good Christmas, reminding him just how much he needed them. Good friends. It had been shocking as well, to meet Quatre’s fiancé turned wife, her stomach already showing signs; and Trowa’s new girlfriend who he’d met only a few months after Christmas seven. Wufei still with the Earth Preventers, Sally by his side, their little girl having just turned one and already asleep in Sally’s arms.
He wasn’t there for the tenth Christmas either. Undercover once again, and it wasn’t the type of thing he could just walk away from for a couple of days. Really intensive stuff, had to stay and dish it out. He wasn’t finished with it until the end of January and he was pretty sure he slept until March once he got back to his place. Another Christmas missed, and the first New Years he didn’t see the fireworks over Cinq, even on a television.
Then there was Christmas eleven. Another Christmas where he didn’t make it to the party, but he did get to see the others. Despite his status at UCPA they knew what he was doing, usually knew where he was and what the current project was. After all, they were Gundam pilots, the boys who saved the universe and brought peace to all. They were golden boys. Wufei, Heero, and Trowa were involved with the EP program, they already had access to a lot of what was going on, and the UCPA and EP worked together on many cases, but they patrolled different parts of the world. EP’s jurisdiction didn’t include space outside of Earth’s satellite radius, UCPA took care of everything else.
They kept an eye on where he was and what he was doing, as well as they could, which was probably why they were always so cool with him missing the one real tradition they had set up between them. It was also the only way they would have been able to find out he had been involved in a shootout on P6. He’d been on patrol duty for an Ambassador, behind the scenes so he wouldn’t get noticed or tagged. He worked undercover too much to risk it all on having some camera pick up his face. It was bad enough that he was a Gundam boy. At least growing up had changed his features, and a few months after the war he’d finally cut his hair – he hadn’t needed it anymore.
There had been an attempt, something that soon turned wicked and ugly and he’d acted first, leaping into motion without thought, only knowing with conviction in his mind what he had to do. His job, saving another person’s life. He lived through war, lived through battle in space, he was sure as hell going to live through some quack with a gun on the ground.
He woke up in a private hospital room, hung with a glorious amount of red and green and white Christmas decorations which he soon found out was the doing of Wufei’s daughter and Quatre’s small son. Trowa was sitting in the chair beside his bed, alert and awake, not looking that worse for wear, though a row of empty paper coffee cups were starting to take over the tray meant for hospital jello. He smiled widely and leaned forward to ruffle his shaggy mop of hair.
“Took you long enough. Let me grab the others.”
He’d been a little surprised that they had all come, just because it was the holidays, because he woke up on Christmas day with not only the four of them around him, but Sally and Quatre’s wife Penelope, and the little kids too. It hadn’t just been the four of them, but all of them. Even Trowa’s girlfriend, now going on four and a half years, were all around him, smiling and laughing and talking. There was even a small tree in the corner of the room, white lights and a few shining red balls on it, though he could only see the top of it from where he lay. Eventually he saw everything, after Heero helped him sit up with a bit of effort and some striking pang through his chest and his left lung, which he soon found out had been punctured and torn and gone through hours of surgery.
Christmas eleven had been good, even if it had been spent in a hospital. It had still been bright and cheerful and warm, and he’d be thankful for the good memories of Christmas eleven because they had to tide him over until Christmas fifteen, which was his next real Christmas.
He got through the whole day of the Eve of Christmas twelve and then he was woken up jarringly from a solid sleep at three am by an emergency call. Another agent in UCPA who was eight hours late for a check in. She was a good friend, though they’d never worked together, they knew each other, saw each other in the building and at some meetings. They weren’t suppose to know the other were agents, much less undercover agents. But when you were good you could tell these things, and when you run into each other at a UCPA headquarters, you can’t help it.
He left a note on the front of his door and was off the property within minutes, pushing his rental car to its limits, one hand on the wheel, the other pressing his phone to his ear as he spoke calmly to a woman at the local shuttle port and arranged a series of flights that would get him where he needed to be.
The presents from the others arrived in a series of packages and were waiting for him when he got back in mid January.
The next year he was tracking an arms dealer, one that had the potential to be an actual, viable threat. He was on the road and in space for months, could barely remember what time it was and to get sleep, much less the day or the month. All there was, was evidence, a thin, translucent trail that he was so focused on following that he didn’t even realize Thanksgiving passed, didn’t know it was December, didn’t remember that he needed to by presents, didn’t even recognize the weather get colder as January came. Flowers were blooming in April when he finally tagged the guy. He was suppose to bring him in alive, but considering it took him eight months to get on the same colony, much less actually see him… He ended up putting a bullet between his eyes and gathering up the groupies.
Christmas fourteen another mission, gone for the month, got back on the 26th and was kicking himself so hard he was sure he gave himself bruises.
Then blessed Christmas fifteen. Back together again, finally seeing everyone, and giving an extra present for the one he’d missed out on two years before. Everyone was happy to see each other and he got the shock of his life when Wufei’s daughter was seven and came running down the hall at break neck speed to launch herself at him, the uncle she couldn’t possibly remember, but had apparently been being told stories about and nonetheless loved fiercely. Quatre’s son was six and just as rambunctious as Wufei’s daughter, if not a bit more reserved, and Penelope was carrying another little one, a new daughter. Trowa was married, though momentarily childless, they were happy.
And then there was the mission that started on R4-2. The one that started in February and took his life away for the next year and a half. There was no Christmas sixteen and the only contact that he had with any of them at the time was a quick email to Quatre at the beginning of December asking him to tell the others not to get presents, telling him that he wasn’t going to be around to pick anything up, it’d be better just to not deal with it. Two years, to the day, he was in a coma.
Nobody knew what happened to him, he just fell off the face of the planet, not that he meant to, nobody really plans on falling into a coma. It’s one of those twists in the road that most people don’t ever meet, and the people who do sure as shit never expected that they would.
He was told later that the others put up a big fuss about the whole thing. EP isn’t suppose to interfere with UCPA, they work together, they help out, but EP field agents are not suppose to involve themselves in field work of UCPA unless help is specifically asked for. So instead they turned in their badges, went on vacation, and dug up everything they could. Eventually Wufei stumbled upon him. He wasn’t allowed to be transported back to Earth, the Agency had specific regulation against that.
Instead he was kept in the colonies at an UPCA controlled hospital. Christmas seventeen was all the pilots visiting, none of their families. They had tried to work out a way for one of them to always be there, in case he woke up, but the chances with coma patients are never very good and even though they were the stars of EP and were given a lot of leeway that they shouldn’t have gotten, not even they could ask for weeks and months of vacation or medical leave so they could sit by a friend who had a twelve percent chance of waking up.
But they all made it there for Christmas, decorated his little room as much as they were allowed. Maybe there were some false hopes that he’d wake up to the cheerful atmosphere and familiar faces, friends as close as family. Nobody talked about it after he woke up, but he likes to think that’s what they all were hoping for. He didn’t wake up though. Not for Christmas seventeen, not for Christmas eighteen – another bleary little Christmas, and this time they couldn’t not spend it with family.
Heero came though. Left his girlfriend back on Earth even though they’d been together almost two years and he was supposed to be at Christmas with the family this year. He flew in Christmas Eve and put up a little tree, just two and a half feet high, with little white lights. That was as much as he’d been willing to tell about Christmas eighteen and coming to visit, he never gave any details or what he did, just made it sound like he sat beside the hospital bed and drank spiked eggnog all day or something. If Heero’d been expecting that he’d wake up, the holiday was a disappointment.
He did wake up though. In the middle of August, with hot air outside and the air-conditioning on inside. There wasn’t anything to trigger it, nothing special, he just blinked his eyes open, heavy and still tired, wondering what had happened this time because he couldn’t quite make out his fuzzy memories. Something about another gang group and being pushed out of a helicopter. He didn’t like the memories he had.
There were sirens outside and activity all around. The door to his room was closed but he could still hear the wails of a crying woman, screaming for something – someone. It was a hospital and people were dying, but not him. He blinked up at the ceiling, eyes moving to the television across the room that was on, volume low. It was the news, the weather, and apparently it was two years later than he remembered it being. He thought he took the news pretty well, even if he’d jumped out of bed and smashed straight to the floor. Not moving for two years meant a world of muscle deterioration.
Everybody came to visit him, like Christmas in the middle of August. Laughing and crying, a lot of crying from wives he didn’t even think he knew all that well, and the kids too. But the other four, no crying from them, and he’d probably have been worried if they had. He liked seeing everyone, but he was weak and pale and could barely push himself up into a sitting position, his arms stick thin. He felt like he’d been back on the streets again.
Christmas nineteen was good. He was good. He had his own place on N6, he’d been doing physical therapy for three and a half months and been pushing himself hard, harder than his first trainer had wanted him to. He’d fired the man and picked up someone else, fired him and did his own thing. He wasn’t back to what he considered normal, but he was better than he’d been in August. His neighbors across the street were nice, a woman, Stacy, and her two daughters – shy at first when he first arrived, limping and walking slowly with a cane at the end of August. Once their mother walked them over a few days later, bulging pie in hand, twins cowering behind her, to see his spars house and tanks teaming with multi-colored fish, they got more bold.
By Christmas he knew them better. He went to Earth for the usual reunion and party, had a good time seeing everyone, silently took in the questions of concern and congratulations on how well he looked. The kids were older, amazingly so, now able to go around the party by themselves, bothered by parent supervision, enjoying themselves with other kids their ages. Heero was newly married to a Luan who seemed nice enough, though didn’t quite fit in with the others’ wives; and Trowa and Fae were just announcing their pregnancy.
Another year, this one with more time to keep in touch than any since he joined UCPA. He wasn’t back on active duty yet, was doing some desk work, intelligence behind a mess of paper, coming up with where other agents needed to go, what needed to be done, who needed to be dealt with, who was a threat and who wasn’t. He was good at it, he would think for a long time after that his superiors were surprised how good he was at it, despite the fact that they knew he’d been in the war, that he’d been a Gundam pilot and had to deduce all of it for himself for years as he fought.
He was offered position back in active duty before Christmas twenty, and after a talk with the Agency they worked something out with him. His skills were valuable, he was at the top of their agent list, not many who could do what he did; but he didn’t want to be doing it all the time. The blood and violence and pain got old after a time, he was tired, exhausted, couldn’t be out there all the time; and he was good at what he was doing from behind a computer. For Christmas twenty, he became an on-call agent, probably one of the weirdest things the Agency had come up with in the last twenty years since their founding at the end of the war.
Christmas once again on Earth and with friends and family. He left presents for Stacy and the twins before he left, read them Christmas stories a lot during December, told them about Santa Claus and sang songs with them. But the actual day he was with the others, all together and happy. Laughing and talking once again, the kids another year older.
Christmas twenty one and once again he wasn’t making the trek to Earth. It wasn’t that he had work, or that he didn’t want to, but Stacy and the girls invited him to have Christmas with them and he felt compelled to do it. John was in prison, Stacy had told him only a few weeks before, after the girls had suddenly grabbed him by the arms and dragged him to their tree and demanded that he be there for Christmas with them. They hadn’t had a father since they were three, and while he didn’t want to replace John in any way, the thought of a small Christmas with no large party, was pleasant.
There’d be none of the other pilots either, but when he started talking to them it seemed like things were changing for everybody. Quatre’s wife was pregnant with her third child, their son was getting antsy at Relena’s parties and they had been playing with the idea of vacationing somewhere away for Christmas for awhile. Trowa and Fae had their little one and Fae’s family wanted them to have Christmas with them, at their house. Wufei and Sally wanted to take the kids to the mountains to go skiing for the holidays, and it seemed that if the others weren’t up for the big party, Heero and Luan could find something else to do as well.
They agreed to spend New Years together instead.
And now it was Christmas twenty two, the 23rd, just a few days away from Christmas tree and presents and the twins coming over for dinner, dragging however many presents they could fit in their arms with them.
The day passed slowly, reading, doing some yard work, even risking the malls to go and do some last minute shopping, seeing if anything is on sale that the twins need to have. Need to have was a blatant lie – they aren’t in need of anything, but without having anybody else around, he spoils them silly. Stacy got her fair share in the backlash of it all. It was one of the things Stacy asked him about constantly. Girlfriends, lovers, potential one night stands. She treated him like her gossip girlfriend, which he always found interesting because he doesn’t gossip, never has. His girlfriends never last long, temporary relationships, nothing more. He was alone his whole life, with the exception of some star people here and there, and now he has the other pilots, he has Stacy and the twins, he didn’t need anybody else, and it seemed to show in his relationships.
Stacy and the girls got back late on the twenty third, the girls walking bleary-eyed beside their mom, going straight up to bed no doubt. He was still reading, the fireplace crackling and warming up the room with orange light.
Christmas Eve was quiet as well, or would have been if the girls didn’t come plowing through his door at noon, screaming that he was late for lunch. That was new. He’d spent the Eve alone last Christmas. Apparently they were adding something new onto the tradition. With barely enough time to put away what he’d taken out to make a sandwich with, the girls dragged him across the street and into their house, giggling and laughing, May ending up on his shoulders, June clasping him around the waist, her feet on top of his, having him walk for her. He must have looked like a monster when he came in the door, but Stacy just smiled and put sandwiches on the table. A small lunch, but apparently she had a big dinner going in the kitchen.
He was stuffed silly when he walked home after helping put the girls to bed, not even able to accept another cup of coffee, should have not accepted the first one with dessert – shouldn’t have done dessert at all. But it was a happy full feeling, and he knew he’d be feeling the same way tomorrow evening. He clicked on the lights of his tree, inspected the scene for a moment, along with the few presents under its branches. It’ll be a good Christmas – Christmas twenty two.
When the doorbell rang the next day he was just putting the duck in the lower oven, getting ready for the long haul that it would take to cook. Wiping his hands he crossed through the living room and to the door, hand hovering over the knob for a moment. He wasn’t expecting anyone, didn’t have a clue who would be ringing the bell, because it sure as hell wasn’t Stacy or the girls, they treated his house like their own.
Heero had a duffle in one hand and a computer case in the other and stared back at him like he was actually supposed to be there. After a moment when nothing happened, he spoke. “Luan and I split up.”
Pulling the door open, he stepped back to allow the other into the house, his lips spreading into a small, sad smile. No wonder Heero looked like that – he was supposed to be there. “Sure, I have another room.” A small room. How or why he even had a guest bedroom he didn’t know, he never had any guests over, except for the girls, who occasionally fell asleep on the double bed; and that was what made it worth while.
“Thanks.”
It would be another good Christmas – Christmas twenty two.
: End :