Seawater for end1essly
Title: Seawater
Recipient: end1essly
Rating: T
Warnings: language
Summary: Through three encounters, Quatre reflects on his role in life after the war.
Author: liafic
Quatre has begun to remember the war as he remembers some childhood things-in fleeting scenes of pastel colours, in the briefest recollection of sensations that linger inside him like a ghost. He remembers the cold rush of night air in the desert during his first moments on Earth. He remembers the rising cadences of muted conversations, the whispered names of the dead. He remembers the moment he looked into mottled green eyes, the colour of sunshine through treetops, and finally understood what it meant to be alive.
He finds Dorothy sitting on the rocks by the shoreline, dipping her pale feet into the sun-dappled surface of the ocean. There are moments like these, when she is at her most unguarded, that he feels privileged to call her a friend. She is a far cry from the desperate girl who ran him through and watched him bleed in the control room of Libra, though she still bears a tension in her movements that sometimes gives her the air of a predator coiled for attack.
They understand one another, and she only ever asks the hard questions. With Dorothy, Quatre has come to learn, there is no such thing as the elephant in the room. He slips his shoes off and slides down the rock next to her, watching the cuffs of his trousers lap up seawater as they both stare into the midmorning sun.
“I was thinking about your ancestors,” she says, as if this is the most natural thing in the world and an obvious topic for conversation.
“Were you?” he answers as he brushes rock dust off the palms of his hands.
“I wondered if you might have some sort of genetic memory for a nomadic lifestyle, but then again, perhaps life in the colonies has severed your link to the earth.”
“Are you giving me a veiled hint, Dorothy?”
“Of course not,” she replies. When she turns to him, the sun reflects off her pale hair, and he recalls the angelic warriors of renaissance paintings. “But I will now. I’ve been thinking of visiting the circus.”
“All right,” he says. “All right. My only answer is that I haven’t seen him in some time.”
“Have you become too important in this new world to fraternise with your old comrades?”
“You know as well as I do that I have no time for social commitments.”
“Well, I never took you to be so bourgeois,” she says, as though the discovery amuses her. “You expect that Trowa has all the time in the world, I suppose.”
“Now you’re just being cruel.”
“On the contrary, I worry about you. The truth is that the wars took their toll on all of us, and pushing those memories into the past will only scar you in the end.” She says it plainly, as if she is simply stating a fact that might interest him, but her feet have stilled in the sea, and the push and pull of the tide lingers in the silence between them.
Quatre withdraws his legs from the water and stands, reaching a hand toward her abruptly. She waves it away and pushes herself up, tilting the wide brim of her hat to bring her face into lace-patterned shadow. “Quatre . . .” she says.
“Can I expect to be interrogated by you each time the economic summit visits Catalonia?”
“Oh, relax,” she snaps as she strides past him onto the wide and sandy shore. In the distance, children run splashing into the surf, and their laughter echoes across the beach like the cries of gulls.
.
In his earliest memories, his father is standing in front of a window, silhouetted by the artificially golden light of the colonies. Even as a child, he realised that his father was striving for something, that he was ruled by principles too intangible to even describe. Quatre now bears just an echo of these responsibilities, but he knows what it means to feel the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knows what it means to mutter insha’Allah at the end of all his plans.
Video calls from Duo arrive with a certain amount of regularity, like Sweepers shipments or natural disasters. The screen in the office of Quatre’s flat crackles for a few moments as the intercolonial connection is established, and then there is a flicker of white teeth and the end of a question, the beginning lost in the thousands of kilometres that separate them. Today, Duo is smudged with machine oil, and his hair is tied back in a ponytail that just brushes the nape of his neck. Perhaps he is growing it out again, Quatre thinks, since it was much shorter the last time they spoke.
“. . . Up in your ivory tower?”
“Things are fine, Duo,” Quatre says. “Hectic, but fine.”
The view on the screen shakes for a moment, and Quatre recognises that Duo is calling from his mobile phone in the scrapyard. The floodlights glint off heaps of charred metal and the shadows of a chain-link fence, and for some reason, seeing Duo in his natural habitat is comforting.
“Hey, you ever think about taking a vacation?”
“Did you have something in mind?”
“What, are you kidding me? Life is great over here. I got nothing but babes and booze.”
“Christ, Duo,” Quatre says.
“But seriously, some time away from the job might do you good. Or were you planning to pull us out of the recession singlehandedly? L2 would thank you for it, anyway.”
“Is business stalling, then?”
“Come on, business is great. Are you trying to change the subject?”
“Duo, really, time off just might not be in the cards right now.”
In the windows that line his office, the lights fade dull red before blinking out into darkness, a process meant to mimic the natural sunsets of the Earth. The distant hum of the colony lulls Quatre for just a moment as he leans back in his chair and flips absentmindedly through his calendar.
“Look. Take this advice however you want, but life will catch up with you sooner or later. You can’t keep running forever.”
“You think I’m running?”
“Well, take it however you want.”
Quatre sighs, pinching his fingers across the bridge of his nose. “Do you still think about the war?” he asks. “I mean, are you still there? Is part of you still there?”
“Aw, fuck, Quatre. Every day, right?” Duo says, and his mouth twists into something between a smile and a grimace. The video begins to shake again as he locks up the scrapyard for the evening and begins his walk home, cutting the floodlights and extinguishing the screen into semidarkness. “I guess . . .” he starts. “You know, I guess it just gets easier over time.”
.
Quatre does not really remember having been to the circus before. He must have gone as a child, of course, because the smell of candied apples and coloured canvas and dried hay is familiar, but he has no concrete recollection of the experience. The heat of the summer night in the south of France creeps up the back of his neck, clinging damply to the space under his collar, and he closes his eyes for one delirious moment. When he opens them again, the lighting is dim, and he can just make out the curl of his fingers in his lap as he waits for the show to open.
There was a time when he would have given anything to run away from his responsibilities, back when he was younger and the wars had just ended and his wounds were still fresh under his skin. He had felt intoxicated by life and eager to experience the world, trapped by his business and his home on the colonies. Now he has settled into his routine as though it has been worn into him over time, like water slowly eroding a mountain. He has accepted his place in life and his endless list of duties, though a longing for something nameless still hums deep in his bones.
Love happened slowly for him, blooming up between the cracks in his life like a weed that he could not kill. We can take it as it comes, Trowa had once told him. At the time, they had not even touched beyond a casual embrace, but they both knew they were standing on the edge of something dangerous. It happened slowly as all loves do: Trowa asked no more of him than he was willing to give, and Quatre thought of him through his long absences the way one thinks of the moon-always there, always patient.
It happened slowly.
When the curtain rises and the lion bounds out to the centre of the ring, the roar of the crowd rises to a crescendo, the clapping a quick staccato like gunfire. As Quatre looks out across the tent, into the shadows where a man holding a clown mask stands silent and waiting, he remembers a moment from years ago: He was framed against the cockpit of his mobile suit, the wind stinging across his cheeks, and he looked out across a battlefield and knew he had met his first ally. They can take it as it comes, Quatre thinks, as their eyes meet and his lips quirk up in a half smile, and the crowd falls to a hush as Trowa takes the stage.
Recipient: end1essly
Rating: T
Warnings: language
Summary: Through three encounters, Quatre reflects on his role in life after the war.
Author: liafic
Quatre has begun to remember the war as he remembers some childhood things-in fleeting scenes of pastel colours, in the briefest recollection of sensations that linger inside him like a ghost. He remembers the cold rush of night air in the desert during his first moments on Earth. He remembers the rising cadences of muted conversations, the whispered names of the dead. He remembers the moment he looked into mottled green eyes, the colour of sunshine through treetops, and finally understood what it meant to be alive.
He finds Dorothy sitting on the rocks by the shoreline, dipping her pale feet into the sun-dappled surface of the ocean. There are moments like these, when she is at her most unguarded, that he feels privileged to call her a friend. She is a far cry from the desperate girl who ran him through and watched him bleed in the control room of Libra, though she still bears a tension in her movements that sometimes gives her the air of a predator coiled for attack.
They understand one another, and she only ever asks the hard questions. With Dorothy, Quatre has come to learn, there is no such thing as the elephant in the room. He slips his shoes off and slides down the rock next to her, watching the cuffs of his trousers lap up seawater as they both stare into the midmorning sun.
“I was thinking about your ancestors,” she says, as if this is the most natural thing in the world and an obvious topic for conversation.
“Were you?” he answers as he brushes rock dust off the palms of his hands.
“I wondered if you might have some sort of genetic memory for a nomadic lifestyle, but then again, perhaps life in the colonies has severed your link to the earth.”
“Are you giving me a veiled hint, Dorothy?”
“Of course not,” she replies. When she turns to him, the sun reflects off her pale hair, and he recalls the angelic warriors of renaissance paintings. “But I will now. I’ve been thinking of visiting the circus.”
“All right,” he says. “All right. My only answer is that I haven’t seen him in some time.”
“Have you become too important in this new world to fraternise with your old comrades?”
“You know as well as I do that I have no time for social commitments.”
“Well, I never took you to be so bourgeois,” she says, as though the discovery amuses her. “You expect that Trowa has all the time in the world, I suppose.”
“Now you’re just being cruel.”
“On the contrary, I worry about you. The truth is that the wars took their toll on all of us, and pushing those memories into the past will only scar you in the end.” She says it plainly, as if she is simply stating a fact that might interest him, but her feet have stilled in the sea, and the push and pull of the tide lingers in the silence between them.
Quatre withdraws his legs from the water and stands, reaching a hand toward her abruptly. She waves it away and pushes herself up, tilting the wide brim of her hat to bring her face into lace-patterned shadow. “Quatre . . .” she says.
“Can I expect to be interrogated by you each time the economic summit visits Catalonia?”
“Oh, relax,” she snaps as she strides past him onto the wide and sandy shore. In the distance, children run splashing into the surf, and their laughter echoes across the beach like the cries of gulls.
.
In his earliest memories, his father is standing in front of a window, silhouetted by the artificially golden light of the colonies. Even as a child, he realised that his father was striving for something, that he was ruled by principles too intangible to even describe. Quatre now bears just an echo of these responsibilities, but he knows what it means to feel the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knows what it means to mutter insha’Allah at the end of all his plans.
Video calls from Duo arrive with a certain amount of regularity, like Sweepers shipments or natural disasters. The screen in the office of Quatre’s flat crackles for a few moments as the intercolonial connection is established, and then there is a flicker of white teeth and the end of a question, the beginning lost in the thousands of kilometres that separate them. Today, Duo is smudged with machine oil, and his hair is tied back in a ponytail that just brushes the nape of his neck. Perhaps he is growing it out again, Quatre thinks, since it was much shorter the last time they spoke.
“. . . Up in your ivory tower?”
“Things are fine, Duo,” Quatre says. “Hectic, but fine.”
The view on the screen shakes for a moment, and Quatre recognises that Duo is calling from his mobile phone in the scrapyard. The floodlights glint off heaps of charred metal and the shadows of a chain-link fence, and for some reason, seeing Duo in his natural habitat is comforting.
“Hey, you ever think about taking a vacation?”
“Did you have something in mind?”
“What, are you kidding me? Life is great over here. I got nothing but babes and booze.”
“Christ, Duo,” Quatre says.
“But seriously, some time away from the job might do you good. Or were you planning to pull us out of the recession singlehandedly? L2 would thank you for it, anyway.”
“Is business stalling, then?”
“Come on, business is great. Are you trying to change the subject?”
“Duo, really, time off just might not be in the cards right now.”
In the windows that line his office, the lights fade dull red before blinking out into darkness, a process meant to mimic the natural sunsets of the Earth. The distant hum of the colony lulls Quatre for just a moment as he leans back in his chair and flips absentmindedly through his calendar.
“Look. Take this advice however you want, but life will catch up with you sooner or later. You can’t keep running forever.”
“You think I’m running?”
“Well, take it however you want.”
Quatre sighs, pinching his fingers across the bridge of his nose. “Do you still think about the war?” he asks. “I mean, are you still there? Is part of you still there?”
“Aw, fuck, Quatre. Every day, right?” Duo says, and his mouth twists into something between a smile and a grimace. The video begins to shake again as he locks up the scrapyard for the evening and begins his walk home, cutting the floodlights and extinguishing the screen into semidarkness. “I guess . . .” he starts. “You know, I guess it just gets easier over time.”
.
Quatre does not really remember having been to the circus before. He must have gone as a child, of course, because the smell of candied apples and coloured canvas and dried hay is familiar, but he has no concrete recollection of the experience. The heat of the summer night in the south of France creeps up the back of his neck, clinging damply to the space under his collar, and he closes his eyes for one delirious moment. When he opens them again, the lighting is dim, and he can just make out the curl of his fingers in his lap as he waits for the show to open.
There was a time when he would have given anything to run away from his responsibilities, back when he was younger and the wars had just ended and his wounds were still fresh under his skin. He had felt intoxicated by life and eager to experience the world, trapped by his business and his home on the colonies. Now he has settled into his routine as though it has been worn into him over time, like water slowly eroding a mountain. He has accepted his place in life and his endless list of duties, though a longing for something nameless still hums deep in his bones.
Love happened slowly for him, blooming up between the cracks in his life like a weed that he could not kill. We can take it as it comes, Trowa had once told him. At the time, they had not even touched beyond a casual embrace, but they both knew they were standing on the edge of something dangerous. It happened slowly as all loves do: Trowa asked no more of him than he was willing to give, and Quatre thought of him through his long absences the way one thinks of the moon-always there, always patient.
It happened slowly.
When the curtain rises and the lion bounds out to the centre of the ring, the roar of the crowd rises to a crescendo, the clapping a quick staccato like gunfire. As Quatre looks out across the tent, into the shadows where a man holding a clown mask stands silent and waiting, he remembers a moment from years ago: He was framed against the cockpit of his mobile suit, the wind stinging across his cheeks, and he looked out across a battlefield and knew he had met his first ally. They can take it as it comes, Quatre thinks, as their eyes meet and his lips quirk up in a half smile, and the crowd falls to a hush as Trowa takes the stage.