Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Broken Ties ❯ Come What May ( Chapter 4 )

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing

Title: Broken Ties

Author: little princess

Archive: fanfiction.net mediaminer.og my personal website and GWFF yahoo group

Rating: PG13

Warnings: Friendship fic and I guess Angst. Talk about loved ones death in the last chapter yet not really a death fic I guess.

Pairings: it's a friendship fic, no real pairings, just the mention that they moved on and got married (non-yaoi) to OC's who don't play a big part here.

Summary: At the end of Endless Waltz, we are left not knowing what will happen to the gw boys. In this version, they remain friends for a couple of years, but in the end, their friendship seems to die like most friendships you have at such a young age do.

Come What May

Then end of the war brought difficulties for me. I had never expected to survive it, not even after I'd blown myself up and found out I was still alive. After the war in 195 I had no idea of what to make of my life and I took the incident at the end of 196 as another chance to die. But I didn't succeed, I didn't die, I survived. And now I had to stay alive with no reason or meaning in the world at all.

It was this knowledge, the emptiness I'd felt between the two wars, that made my decision to do as Relena had asked and become part of her bodyguards easier. At the least it was something to do, giving me less time to think about why I could possibly have survived.

Duo was the one who kept in contact by spamming us all the time, doing stupid things just to get some attention. But he was also the one who actually stopped by my place now and then and at those times we almost seemed like normal friends. How he saw it, I don't know, maybe it was just plain obvious to anyone, but I found it hard to let all my conditioning go. Whenever we were in a restaurant, I would know everyone's exact spot, what they wore, whom they were with, when they entered and left and even what they'd ordered. If a man in a suit went behind the scenes, I was suspicious, thinking that he might be a drugs dealer or some other kind of threat when he could just as well have been the manager of the place.

Duo noticed, he was the only one who noticed and he offered to help me socialise with people in order to become less suspicious. Strangely enough, this helped. I began to realise not everybody had something evil going on in their minds, I learned what normal meant and knowing that, I became more and more aware that I was overreacting. Our faces had been shown to the public, but our names had not and a face is something people tend to forget. Especially when said face has a history like ours.

Thanks to Duo I saw how foolish I was, looking back all the time, scowling at everybody I saw on the streets, as if daring them to try something. I stopped pushing people away and it became easier for me to do my job, as Relena's other guards started to trust me now that I was no longer so suspicious of them.

Quatre's departure was perhaps inevitable, as he was so different from the rest of us. He was at the top before any of us had even begun making our way up and sooner or later I knew he was going to leave us be. I expected it and, returning to my training even though Duo had tried so hard to train it all out of me, I kept my distance. When he didn't show up for that Christmas dinner, saying he had work to do, I knew it was over and I was ready to accept that.

However, when Duo started to distance himself from me soon after, that was something I was not prepared for. Granted, I was glad that my mailbox was no longer overloaded with crap every other day, but I missed the presence of his normal mails as well. Just those simple mails like `hi, how are ya? I'm good, why wouldn't I be? Just wanted to let you know that there's this new hair die on the market, it's purple and I think it would suit Trowa with his circus outfit. Bye. Duo' Those mails were crazy, but I loved them and had all of them stored in a document, even though I hardly ever replied to any of his, what I referred to others to as `nonsense'.

But Duo's mails stopped coming every day, soon it was reduced to a simple one-liner once a week and one week, even that didn't come. I waited the next week for that mail that would state he was ok, but seven days later, my mailbox was still empty of a word from Duo. And the week after that, no mail again, same happened the week after that. And the week after that. And the week after that. I knew he was alive, Wufei had called me once, asking me when the last time was that I'd gotten word from Duo and he told me it had been a few weeks with him as well. Obviously he was abandoning us.

I didn't know how to deal with this. Duo wasn't one of those people who would one day disappear on you, he was just one of those who would always be there. So when he went I knew it was the end of the five of us as friends and I knew my life would never be the same.

I stayed as Relena's guard for a couple more years, making more than enough money and having no means of how to spend it. So when I was twenty-nine and I wanted a year off the work to think for myself what I wanted next, I could afford it. However, that choice hadn't been as good for me as I'd thought. Again, I had too much time on my hands to think and too few contacts to spend time with. Last of the boys I had been in contact with was Trowa, who had mailed me that he had finally left the circus, but that was over a year ago. The last of them I'd actually seen was Wufei, a few years before when I had another job at the preventors and Wufei was the one to inform me. We had talked a bit then, but hadn't bothered to keep in contact afterwards.

So when I quit as Relena's guard I had almost no friends left and absolutely nothing to do. The first few weeks were pretty good, I finally had time to surf the net a little, learn some new stuff, see what was really going on in the world, but soon enough I was bored with that as well. Yes, I actually got bored with my laptop!

That was when my life went all the way downhill.

I started going out at night, getting drunk more often than not. I met some people in the pubs I hung out with, had the occasional one-night-stands, wasted my money on those trips out and got no happier at all.

And then there was this one woman I ended up in bed with after a long day and a lot of alcohol. I didn't even know her last name when we were together to relieve some stress, but I found it out two months later when she showed up on my doorstep, pregnant with my daughter, telling me that not only did I have the right to know, but also the obligation to pay up.

So, now I was forced to get my life back together again if I wanted to cough up the money I would have to pay. However, I told her that I wanted to see the child as well if I paid for her and somehow I ended up as a weekend-father to a little girl named Nancy

It was a lot of work, making sure I had a stable house for my daughter so that the judge wouldn't take her from me and it was weird to hear her call me `dad' when I'd never had a father or a mother to begin with. But I got used to having a daughter and even started looking forward to every other weekend she'd spend at my place. I cared for her in a way that I had never cared for anyone, but I allowed myself to experiment on this area, because I knew I could afford to fail. She always had her mother left if I screwed up one night, right?

However, when she was eight and her mother died, the girl suddenly came into my full care and I lacked the friends to tell me what to do. First things first, I arranged a babysitter for her since I worked five days a week. Then I realised that suddenly I had to spend much more money than I was used to, but I could still afford it. I had a good job as head of security, not at Relena's place, but at some other governmental building. By the time my daughter was thirteen, I figured she was old enough to be on her own one day a week, so I started working the Saturdays as well. I knew the nightshift paid better and they'd asked me for that, but I didn't think it was responsible for a little girl to be alone at night, she seemed so fragile sometimes. So I didn't take the offer and instead used the extra payment for that weekend day to pay for her school. I could've tried living in an apartment that cost half of what mine cost, but I liked to live where I did, liked the building, liked the part of the city and hated moving for her sake as well as mine.

My daughter Nancy turned fifteen a few days ago but I wasn't there for her, I had to work. It was on a Saturday, so she wasn't up yet when I got up and thus I left a gift for her at the dining table before I headed to work. She wasn't home when I got back, but had left a piece of paper for me, telling me shortly that she was out with friends. The gift was gone, but not mentioned in the note and I didn't hear her come back in until midnight, when I had already gone to bed. I rarely stay up these days.

It pains me to see the relationship between me and my daughter and it is those times I spend thinking of her that I wished I at least still had Duo here with me. When I was fifteen I was so different from what Nancy is now, she is so care-free, a real girl in puberty, wanting to be able to be on her own, yet incapable of discipline herself enough to even clean her room every now and then. She is a beautiful young girl, but I have no way of getting trough to her. I don't understand her world. For me, love was a luxury I couldn't afford and I never really dated at all. But she goes out with boys, claiming to be `so in love' all the time. What should I do with that?

I try hard, I know I please her when I take her to an ice hockey game now and then as she is crazy about that sport and on Sundays, my only day off I try my best to cook something she likes and to be there for her, but more often than not is she out with friends all day and doing some last-minute homework at night. On a school night she is not allowed out after nine o'clock and seeing how she is only fifteen and not yet at the legal age to drink or even be in a pub, her curfew is midnight in the weekends. She has her allowance and some extra money to buy her own clothes, but besides that I know that too often I slip her a few extra bucks anyway, as if that way I could win her approval.

Parenting is so hard. It's more than just setting up a curfew and some rules, but I don't really know what else I can do. We hardly talk, I'm glad I can manage talking to people my age, but teenagers are not adults and I can't connect with her.

I look at her and long for a friend -I hear a whisper naming this friend Duo- who can teach me how to be a good father. I miss my friends from back then whom I know could have helped me and I find myself often thinking if only Duo had been here, then I could ask him what to do and he'd help me out, maybe give me some examples as to how I could get closer to my daughter. But Duo broke contact so many years ago. I have no idea where he is or what he's up to, I know nothing of the people I met during the war. I never wanted them to stop `hanging out' with me, but I never found the right words to tell them, I never knew what to say anyway.

Even though I care more about Nancy than I'd ever deemed possible, if I could do things over again, I probably wouldn't have had her. I would've said something, anything to keep Duo from leaving, no matter how humiliating it would have been and I would never have allowed myself to get so down after I quit as Relena's guard.

No, life wouldn't have looked like this at all, had Duo still been here, had any of them still been here… Though I guess the only one I can blame for not keeping in contact is myself. After all, I never said a word.

Heero Yuy. Pilot 01 of Wing Zero

AC224 March 8th.