Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Scissored Kismets ❯ Lemonade Confessions ( Chapter 2 )

CHAPTER 2: Lemonade Confessions

“EMOTION n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.”

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Absently scribbling little hearts on his pillow with shaky fingertips, Quatre waited for someone to answer on the other line. At the third ring, he rolled onto his back, swallowing the bile that sluiced up his throat.

A glance at his alarm clock told him it was still early for bed: eight-thirty. It was a long journey from the green planet back here on L4 and the very second his feet touched the floor of the spaceport, all he wanted to do was plunge on a mattress and sleep forever. Here he was on a bed now, but the problem was that he couldn't sleep. He had his phone against his ear, clearing his throat almost every minute to make sure his voice still sounds normal. He silently cursed himself for not considering that this call would steal some minutes from the vice foreign minister's sleeping hours. On Earth, it's already three forty-five in the morning. But he just couldn't help it—he felt the need to do this.

A necessity? He pulled his eyebrows together at the thought.

He decided so suddenly that he would try to stop this growing habit sometime this week. No, not this week…maybe next week…or next month…or maybe next…

“Hello..” a sluggish voice broke the monotonous rings on the other line.

“I'm sorry Miss Relena, I didn't mean to wake you—“

“Dorothy's fine,” Relena slurred, the two words punctuated by a long yawn. “I just phoned her this afternoon. It's been a week since I last saw her personally…I think she's having a good time. She's planning to have a vacation this week.”

The girl let out another yawn to the phone and a thought crawled into Quatre's head to say it was intended, an emphasis that he was diminishing the already scant hours of rest of one of the most important people on Earth. He felt his cheeks burn.

“I'm so sorry,” he automatically apologized. After those words left his lips, he found himself tongue-tied and his face grew hotter.

“Nahitchsokay,” Relena mumbled almost unintelligibly. “I just have to cut your stalling stage short…know you'll ask about Dorothy…Er, I wonder why you don't just phone her yourself?”

The silence that followed was awkward, and Relena felt the need to change the topic.

"What happened to you yesterday? You told me you'll come back. It took me almost an hour to convince Heero to use your bike..."

"Heero? You're with Heero?" Quatre rolled back to his belly, staring diffidently at the hollow his head left on the pillow. “I'm very sorry.”

“Quatre, there are millions of other words in the dictionary than just I, am, and sorry,” came Relena's slightly demeaning reply. A discomfited pause succeeded, and her voice sounded again almost at the same time Quatre opened his mouth to politely say good-bye. “Anyway, we had a good time. So back to Dorothy..Hmmm. Not that I'm getting rid of your nightly…or morning calls, it's just you can't carry on like this forever. Besides, you're Quatre Raberba Winner—“

“And she's Dorothy Catalonia,” Quatre finished bitterly, hidden meaning copiously squeezing beneath each letter of the said woman's name.

“Exactly,” Relena firmly agreed, and shifting to a hesitant mode upon studying the silence of the boy, she added, “Well, she's single. And I think there's nothing she wouldn't like about you...”

The boy swallowed. He knew that there's no point in denying what Relena was obviously implying, but he just couldn't bring himself to admit it directly to anyone.

He clearly remembered the first time he started this shameful routine. Exactly on the day after he was released from the hospital, he called up Relena to inquire on Dorothy's whereabouts. He was informed then that the Dorothy had taken the responsibility over the Romefeller Foundation—now a business unit—as its only legatee. At that time, Relena got to see Dorothy more often because the Foundation decided to aid the programs of the vice foreign minister regarding the improvement of Earth-colonies co-existence.

Since the wound on his side was only semi-healed and because he simply didn't have the guts to face Dorothy just yet, he just decided to keep himself updated by asking the best friend of the woman in question. And he gets updated every other night.

That was almost six months ago. He wasn't surprise at all that Relena was trying to put an end to it today.

But no, he wasn't ready to call up Dorothy yet, not after what happened that afternoon.

“…and it would get better after that. What do you think?”

Quatre flinched, realizing he had done it again. Lately, he was being overly absentminded and dreamy, Dorothy being the culprit of it all. A memory surged back at the thought: his last conversation with Duo, over the vid-phone.

'You really are,' he blurted out suddenly, staring at Duo's leering face on the screen but seeing someone else.

'What?' Duo had asked.

'You really are. Kinder than me.'

He tried to shake off Duo's uncontrollable guffaws in his head and resurfaced from the sea of his thoughts, trying to find a probable answer to the question he clearly didn't know what was all about.

“Yes, I agree with that,” he replied, faking ease on his voice.

Another pause from the other line. “Really?”

Quatre chewed on his bottom lip upon realizing that the other's voice sounded seemingly wide awake all of a sudden. He didn't want to ask her to repeat what she had just said; it lasted for at most fifteen minutes, the timepiece on his side-drawer told him. He wasn't in shape for an untimely compromise either.

“No,” he said.

“What?”

“I mean, I don't know,” he blurted out with an unnecessary shrug.

“Come on, it's your chance to see her again.”

Adrenaline charged down his veins at the sentence. “I…what?”

He heard a cross between a sigh and a yawn. “You're not listening, are you?”

He flinched. “Ah, no, I....” he cut his supposed lie with a defeated sigh. He knew he couldn't improvise a lie foolproof enough for Relena.

“Here you go again,” Relena breathed tiredly. “Fine, then. I'm not going to reiterate what I've just said, but I'll give you a summary. Oh, If only you're attentive, you might have noticed my poor delaying tactics. I think you're rubbing off on me a little.”

They exchanged short chuckles at the statement.

“So, uhm…the summary?” Quatre pushed.

“I'm setting you and Dorothy up on a date.”

“Wha—“

“Tomorrow.”

“Hey—“

“I'll see yah, Quatre.”

She hung up. The blonde stared at the phone in disbelief, butterflies swarming to ram against the walls of his stomach.

“Once upon a time, a deity died.”

Dorothy moseyed across the drawing room with a tray in one palm, her visage curled up in her trademark smirk. Two glasses of lemonade were precariously balanced on the tray and as she danced her way to her honey-blonde best friend, the drinks inched closer to the edge.

“And the reader lived happily ever after?” Relena, slumped on the couch, suggested with a disapproving look at the wobbling glasses.

“Not yet,” Dorothy maliciously replied, sliding the tray on the top of the table. The vice foreign minister heaved a sigh of relief the moment the drinks were safe.

“That isn't a nice way to start a story,” Relena scolded. She grabbed her lemonade and wiggled her eyebrows at the taller woman, pressing to hear more of the tale. She knew that when Dorothy's talks were going fairytale-wise, there was something interesting she was going to learn—something that, more often than not, would send her sleeplessly thinking after it was left hanging like a riddle. Oddly, she liked the puzzles.

“I believe we don't share the same definition of the word `nice', Miss Relena,” Dorothy cooed, smiling as she curved her lips over the glass. She took a small guzzle and continued. “A deity died. Mysteriously, she's still alive—her body's still alive I mean, and she learned that it was only her inner self that passed away. Then she met another deity. She met the god of love.”

Relena furrowed her brow. “God of love? Cupid, you mean?”

“Cupid it is.” Dorothy smoothed her hair, a shimmer flaming up in the chill vacuum of her eyes. “The other one's androgynous—you can't call her a goddess, really, even if she looks entirely feminine. In her whole life including a few of the times after her soul died, it was her masculine side that was dominant—except for the time this story happened. So let's just call her a deity. A war deity.”

“I think I've got an idea who that deity is…”

Dorothy ignored the sneer Relena gave her. “The war deity despised Cupid more than any god because he was weak and—“

“Love is not weak,” Relena snapped, getting the implication easily.

“This is my mythology,” Dorothy countered coldly. “And I didn't say it's `love' that is `weak', the stupid little cherub is. Besides, the main character is a war deity, not the goddess of hate. She loves wars and battles, keep that in mind.”

“Please continue,” Relena muttered, resisting the urge to roll her eyes.

Absently prodding the little gems of moisture racing down the glass, Dorothy went on with her story. “Being a god of love, Cupid doesn't like wars. But he was forced to fight—to ward off the mortals' sorrow, according to him. In the battlefield, he turned out to be the war deity's biggest rival.”

Relena tilted her head, amused. Autobiographic mythology, huh? I wonder who Cupid is…

“Cupid emerged as the loser.”

“That's unfair!”

”Quit interrupting. You won't get the story right,” Dorothy snarled.

“I hate your stories,” Relena commented with a shrug. “But I love them all the same.”

Dorothy gave her a smirk. Relena knew all too well that when Dorothy was in this kind of mood, the best thing to do was to humor her. Only a few people knew how fast Dorothy's mood change was. This conversation was mentally written, revised, and revised again before being stuffed up inside Dorothy's sleeve and spoken to a potential listener. Not everyone could understand what she was talking about so she chooses only a few people whom she thought could relate to her stories. That way, she could somehow be patient. Stupid people get on her nerves very easily.

“Very well, then. Where am I? Oh, yes…Cupid's bow and arrows was no match to the war deity's saber. So Cupid lost the duel. Physically, at least. If you look at it the right way, the war deity is the one who was totally ripped open and robbed of all her strength—she was the one defeated. It was a terrible downfall.”

Dorothy stopped for a while, staring intently at her juice. The atmosphere seemed to change a little at the pause that it made Relena look up from her own drink. There was an intensely peculiar aura lingering around Dorothy that was not there earlier…

“Then…the war ended,” Dorothy spoke just as the same time Relena was about to ask what's the matter. “The war deity doesn't have anywhere to go. She half-expected herself to fade away along with the embers of the last battle. But to her misery she did not. She lived, tried to move on, but she simply can't. The words Cupid told her were still ringing in her ears. The little god gave her the life she deserved—a life full of regrets, full of the beasts that chew her piece by piece every time she looks at the mirror, a life full of emotions she never wanted to feel….For the deity, it's worse than hell.”

“Dorothy…” Relena uncomfortably shifted on her seat. Where did that sudden gloominess come from? She wanted to request Dorothy to stop the moment the latter's voice shook, but she knew it couldn't do anything. All of Dorothy's fairytales ends with a standard closing line--which was almost always a question--and once they've started, all you can do to stop them is to wait for them to end.

The storyteller permitted herself a deep sigh. “I don't know…Do you know what I want to do, Miss Relena? I want to murder that Cupid—I want to cut him and let him bleed to death, I lust to yank those wings out of his shoulders and knife his eyes out of their sockets—being the only pair in the universe that saw my weaknesses…I want to hear him scream, scream until he beg for me to stop…But, but…”

“Dorothy, stop it now,” Relena pleaded. Dorothy was shaking now, and there were glitters at the corner of her eyes that threatened to leak. The tale had shifted to the first person point of view. As far as Relena could remember, it was the first time it happened. She left her half-emptied glass on the table and went over to the trembling woman.

“..but I can't,” Dorothy said in a voice no higher than a whisper. “I can't do it. I don't want to hurt him.”

Relena's scooted closer to Dorothy for an embrace, but just as she was inches from her, she found herself stunned for a while. Tears. There were tears freely flowing down the war deity's unblemished cheeks, some skidding to a stop at her chin before catapulting to her collarbone, some streaming continuously to her neck…

Tears! Relena almost rejoiced at the thought. It was the first time she saw Dorothy shed tears. All this time she thought that the woman could never cry, that somehow, her system ceased secreting the salt water because its owner had stoned herself to feel any weak emotion. Relena clamped the feeling down as soon as it bloomed. This was no time to be happy for her best friend's sorrow.

She moved to envelop the weeping lady in her arms, but Dorothy pushed her away, shaking her head furiously.

“Dorothy, please…” Relena muttered.

Letting out a bitter laugh, Dorothy dabbed her face with her fingertips. “Now, there are two pairs of eyes that witnessed my weakness. Cupid's and the Peace dove's.”

Relena shook her head a little and tried yet again to give Dorothy a hug. There was resistance at first, but soon, after a string of childish sobs, Dorothy relented.

“It's never a weakness to show weakness,” Relena whispered to the platinum blonde strands. “Let it all out, Dorothy. It's not healthy to keep all of those inside.”

“What a shame,” Dorothy mulishly hiccoughed, though she made no move to loosen her arms around her friend's waist. “If only I don't know you'll hold a grudge against me, I will try suicide after this. But I think my living hell and the hell in afterlife don't really have any difference, so I'm postponing my death for a while.”

Relena lightly slapped Dorothy's back. “Say something like that again and I'll be the one who'll kill you.”

A forced giggle. “I'd love to have it in my tape recorder, just in case.”

Both of them fell silent for a while. Relena could feel Dorothy's tears dampening her blouse, and apparently there were buckets of those still waiting to be shed. Every single minute that passed was stuffed with a mute confession of a faults and downfalls, of sins and regrets. After almost half an hour, they finally parted.

“Thank you, Miss Relena,” Dorothy murmured, her eyes shooting to Relena's shoulder area. “Now I owe you one clean blouse.”

Relena laughed at the statement, tugging a handkerchief from her pocket and offering it to Dorothy. “I'll be more than willing to be a world map of tearstains if it's equals to unburdening yourself of those kept regrets.”

Dorothy surprised her by giving her a one-armed hug.

“So,” Relena said through her toothy smile. “I think it'll be a happy-ever-after now?”

The platinum blonde snickered. “Not really. This fairytale has a sequel. I bumped into Cupid yesterday.”

Relena stiffened. “What?”

She untangled herself from Dorothy's little cuddle and saw something that shocked her again—though this time it was more mysterious and…intriguing than the first one.

“Uh, Dorothy?”

“Yes?”

“Why are you blushing?”

The taller woman scowled at her. “Miss Relena, your eyes are deceiving you.”

“You are deceiving me,” she retorted with a wet pout. “You're crying over this Cupid one minute then you're all but reddening at the mention of him in the next! Just who is this person?”

Relena felt like no drama ever passed between them when Dorothy put on that trademark sneer again. “You'll know soon enough.”

“I want to know it now.”

Dorothy teasingly batted her eyelashes at her. “You won't understand it right now. Just give me some time.”

So Dorothy refused to choose her as a prospective listener this time. Fantastic, Relena thought sarcastically, but I don't think you're the only one who's got something up your sleeve here.

“It's almost time,” Relena uttered. She paid her wristwatch one quick glance and grinned widely.

“Time for what?” Dorothy questioned, interest brewing in her voice upon seeing the other's face.

“You'll know soon enough,” Relena answered with an imitation of Dorothy's branded leer.

Butterflies don't grow into caterpillars, it's the other way around.

So why did it feel like there were slithery, hair-raising sensations crawling coldly at the pit of his stomach right now? Quatre couldn't quite work out what was the matter with him. His lids felt terribly heavy, having been deprived of rest after his conversation with Relena last night, but he knew he was fully awake. The almost eight-hour jet journey from his colony didn't even lull him to the farthest end of dreamland. Sighing, he reread Relena's text message—the one with the directions where and when the date would be—for at most the hundredth time that hour alone just to make sure he was at the right restaurant.

Unknown to Relena, he already met Dorothy yesterday. Destiny was ruthlessly playful to let them cross their paths again. She was browsing for a good book and then he came over, too thrilled to talk to her after her visit in the hospital. He could've hugged her, but it was her who made the first move. It was the shock of her life.

She kissed him.

His system shuddered ecstatically at the memory. In that abrupt contact he managed to acquaint himself with the delicate arches of her rosebud lips even if he was not responding at all. Her kiss was hungry but purely experimental. The softness of her mouth lingered on his for quite a while; it wasn't even washed away when he ran his tongue on his bottom lip some minutes later. He savored a distant sweetness there that hinted of cherry. He blushed but smiled despite himself upon knowing what flavor of chap stick Dorothy uses.

But what confused him to no end was that Dorothy looked just as shocked as he was when she broke the contact.

Now, he was going to meet her again, thanks to her best friend.

He silently hoped that Relena survive what Dorothy would do to her after this one-sided blind date.

A sideways glance at the restaurant's clock informed him that they should be here now. Bringing his brows together, he once again peered at his cell phone to check the message. Then he felt the worm-like sensations in his stomach transform into one large snake that wrestled with his intestines the moment he picked up the clacks of high heels growing louder and louder…