Sometimes Love’s a Loaded Gun

 

 

One down, one to go

Just another bullet in the chamber

Sometimes love’s a loaded gun

 

Red light, stop and go

Whatcha gonna do when you play with danger?

Sometimes love’s a loaded gun

 

And it shoots to kill…

 

-Alice Cooper

 

~*~

 

It was raining again.  With a weary sigh, I rolled over in my bed and stared out the water-splattered window.  As a kid, we had had so little water that a rainstorm was a blessing, even if it was still hot afterwards and it only lasted for a few precious moments.  So naturally, when I grew up (like *that* ever really happened), I was bound and determined to move to a place that was cool and had lots of water.  Now, instead of roasting alive and dying of thirst, I freeze to death while drowning at the same time.

 

But in the times that it isn’t raining, it’s a pretty decent town.  Never quite like the ones you see in the travel brochures, but certainly a hell of a lot better than the streets… and the constant running from one safehouse to the next.

 

Sometimes it catches me by surprise, the fact that the war is over and I’m still alive.  I think we all get that somedays.  We just stop and look and go, “Oh my god.  It’s over.  It’s really over...”  And I must admit that with all the times I have been captured, tortured, blown up, beat up, and generally tossed around, it really amazes me that I’m in one piece and in as good of health as I am.  Never could figure out how Hiiro managed to keep it all together, both mentally and physically…

 

Damn.  Why did I have to go and think of him when I was perfectly content to stare out the only other window in the rat hole I currently stored my life in and pretend to drown?

 

Because as much as I really didn’t want to admit it, Hiiro Yui was more than just my partner.  He was my friend, one of only five men alive that I would call my brother, and, yeah, I’ll even go for broke and admit that I love him.  And it’s not that little warm fuzzy stuff you can feel for friends and family.  No, *I* couldn’t be so lucky.  I mean I’m head-over-heels, hot-and-heavy in L_O_V_E with him.

 

Don’t ask me when it started, because I honestly don’t know.  I do know, however, that it first started hitting home the day I asked him to kill me and he saved me instead.  He even stuck around until I was okay.  That right there really surprised me, more than him saving me…  Maybe that’s why it hurt when he fell off the face of the universe without a trace.

 

Not that I really expected him to stick around.  Peace has no use for soldiers, let alone a Perfect Soldier.  He and I and Wufei, we’re all kinda in the same boat.  Nowhere to return to and too damn stubborn to let anyone help us.  Still, Chang found his peace--somewhere--in the vastness of it all.  Even I had managed to nail down a less than decent job with miserable pay and worse living conditions.  Mind you, that was during and after fending Quatre off with a stick.  But I wonder if Hiiro ever found the closure he needed to get himself past the war…

 

Sometimes I am very glad I don’t have to deal with being tied down like Quatre and Trowa are.  Especially when you’re in front of a ton of people like they are all day, everyday.  I’ve always been a very mobile person, never staying in one place very long, but always staying within a certain area.  But then again, I really envy the fact that if they went missing, anybody and everybody would care.

 

Oh well.  Can’t have one thing without losing the opportunity cost of something else.

 

It’s still raining outside and my thoughts again drift to Hiiro.  Is he all right?  Is he hurt?  Where is he?  Is it raining where he is?  Or is it sunny?  Or maybe cloudy?  What are the people around him like?  Are there people around him?  Has he finally stripped out of his spandex and started wearing normal pants?  All the thoughts are little trivial things, but for someone who has made an art form out of reading a facial expression that doesn’t exist, they’re really important.  That and maybe I’m just obsessive.

 

I nearly gag as I slip from my bed and stand near the window.  Obsessiveness reminds me of Relena, and Relena… well, we just won’t go there.  I don’t care if the girl was the only hope for peace during the war, she was a stupid rich-ass ojou that nearly got all of us killed, Hiiro more often than not, with her total pacifism nonsense and merry little band following us everywhere.  I wonder if things like ‘secrecy” and ‘discretion’ were ever apart of her higher-evolved language.

 

Absently, I wonder if she’s found him.  That thought makes me very happy and very depressed at the same time.  I mean, on the one hand, he’s been found.  He’s not by himself, even if the company he’s keeping happens to be ojou-san’s.  And, even though I really hate to admit it, he would have a better life with her.  Because of her position, she has the ability to give him anything and everything he could ever need or want.  So unlike me, who has a hard time coming up with the rent for my hole in the wall and is forced to eat three-week old pizza for breakfast.

 

Please note I no longer eat breakfast.

 

The window is beginning to fog up.  That’s a first.  Usually it’s colder inside my apartment than outside.  I don’t even remember the last time the heater worked, damned piece of junk.  Landlord would fix it, but that would mean a dramatic increase in my bill.  I just can’t afford it.  Just like I can’t afford a lot of things, like clothes, and food…  Hell, I can’t even afford soap.  I barely remember the last time I took a hot shower.  I think it ranks right up there with a warm bed and a good night sleep, too.

 

Besides, if I could afford soap, I’d probably try to eat it.  And that’s just nasty.  So I guess I’m better off not having it, ne?

 

Without really thinking about what I’m doing, I start writing Hiiro’s name in the fog.  God, I hope I’m spelling it right in katakana.  I wonder if he ever suspected that in my free time, away from all of them, I tried to learn each of their native languages.  I caught on to Hiiro’s real fast.  Woofie’s was a snap after that, but I struggled with Quatre’s.  With Trowa, I didn’t even know where to start, but he wasn’t too disappointed when he and Quatre found out what I was doing.  They even helped me a little, but it was my project and they left me to it.

 

Yeah, that’s it.  H-I-I-R-O.  HI-I-RO. Hiiro.  God, it looks so simple written down.  Those three little characters hardly do him justice though.  I wonder what his name would look like if it was written in that fancy calligraphy-kanji stuff.  Actually, considering his personality type, the blockish, formal feeling of katakana probably fits him better.  Quickly, I scribble my own name in katakana under it and put a circle around it.  My silent plea for him to come back into my life, out in a place for the entire world to see.

 

In the parts of the window where I’ve marked, I can see my reflection. I’m only mildly surprised to see tears running down my cheeks.  It’s funny how after a long time, a body gets so use to the feeling of crying that it doesn’t even register when you start and when you stop.  Then again, when have I ever stopped crying?  Everything I have ever loved has left me in the end.  Solo died on the streets, still believing that he could protect us from everything if all he did was try a little harder.  Father Maxwell died still believing in God and that everything happed for a reason.  So did Sister Helen.  All it took was one good look at the scars and the nightmares before Hilde ran.  Why the hell would I be so lucky to have Hiiro stay around?  I’m a disease that infects and destroys the ones I love.

 

No, wait.  I’m worse than a disease.  I’m a gun.  A loaded gun that shoots to kill.  A disease is an organism that is attempting to stay alive in the host.  On some insane level, they’re just as alive as the next person.  But a gun has no soul, no life of its own.  It was designed to take life, to be an impartial judge of the living and the dead.  And who better to be the wielder of the gun than Shinigami…

 

I’m sorry, Hiiro.  I feel like I’ve failed you.  I wanted to show you that life had meaning if you let have meaning.  But I’m not the person you should talk to about matters of the heart.  Everyday I wake up with every intention of packing everything up and coming after you.  But I see the scars in the mirror, and I remember all who have come before you, and I convince myself that my life isn’t a place where you could thrive.  It’s probably not even a place where you would live very long.

 

But you see Hiiro, you and I are a lot alike.  We have nowhere to go now.  No one to turn to.  The demons of the past are knocking on our future’s door with the intent to kill that future…and we can’t stop it.  We’re alone in space and time, never to be happy or whole.

 

And maybe that’s the whole point of us being together…

 

Maybe…

 

                     …when the time is right…

 

                                                                                             …and we stop being so stupid…

 

                                                                                                   …we’ll find each other…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…And then we won’t be alone anymore…

 

 

~TK’00