Revelations
Pilot 02 - Lullabies
by INK
"Things go right
Things go wrong
Hearts can break
But not for long
You will grow up big and strong
Sleepy little baby…"
The song is part of my past, part of a segment of my memories that is so buried I sometimes can’t distinguish it from my dreams. It’s too good to be true, really, that’s why I find myself not believing it--that happy, loved little kid in the church, surrounded by peace and warmth can’t be me. Not Duo, the thief, the soldier, the smiling Shinigami. He couldn’t possibly have come from that.
Well, the dream becomes a nightmare before too long, so there’s your justification. I doubt you’ve ever watched the only people who ever loved you die right before your eyes. I have, and I don’t recommend it.
Back to the song, before I really start complaining. It’s a lullaby Sister Helen used to sing to us kids--well, mostly me, since I never did figure out how to fall asleep easily. Now, I still take hours. Sister had such an astonishing repertoire of lullabies, most of which I still remember, amazingly enough. Her voice always sounded like what I thought an angel’s would. Though no angel will ever sing for me.
"Lullaby, lullaby
Baby won’t you close your eyes
You’ll be sleeping by and by
Sleepy little baby--"
Not all memories are happy.
Oh, hell, my voice caught again. And now Heero will wake up and I’ll have a gun at my head before I can take another breath. OK, keep singing, Maxwell. Don’t move, and he’ll keep sleeping. Don’t worry that your voice is rough with emotion suddenly, and a little off key. Just keep singing.
And don’t remember.
Hey, he didn’t wake up. Just shifted a little. Maybe if I slow down and sing real quiet, he won’t notice if I stop completely. Then I can get back to my book, or try to actually get some sleep. Oh, who am I trying to kid? I’ll never be able to concentrate on the book in a mood like this, let alone sleep.
Damn Heero. Damn him for being able to just fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Maybe he wakes up at the drop of a hat, too, and is totally alert instantly, but he doesn’t have to lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours on end. It’s impossible not to have memories when I get that bored. Hell, that’s why I’m always talking--quiet equals boredom, and boredom equals memories.
Why are the good memories so hard to hold onto? Why can’t I burn them into my head as easily as I do the explosions and screaming?
It’s a damn unfair world.
Just keep singing, Duo.
The song’s done. I need another one. And, of course, one pops right up, I must have fifty back there in my head. Coolies and sloughs, lullaby lullaby, coolies and sloughs. Hey, that’s not one of Sister Helen’s! Where is it from? I always ask myself this, and I haven’t gotten any closer to an answer. It’s a mystery.
Prairie lullaby. I don’t know why I know its name, either. But prairies are in the States, on Earth, so I guess we share a birthplace, this old song and I. After all, I don’t know where I came from either.
I feel like that sometimes. Like a plant without roots. Blowing--I haven’t had a real home in years and years. Or people to call a family. No roots. Hehe, a tumbling tumbleweed across the prairie… "Lullaby lullaby, coolies and sloughs."
Why am I singing, anyway? Why did I start singing to this goon who’s asleep beside me? Just impulse, I guess. One night he couldn’t sleep, and I just started singing, songs from a part of me I’d nearly forgotten. I thought he was asleep, so I quit and started to get ready for bed myself, but then he opened his eyes and said, "Don’t stop. I liked it."
Go figure.
He has such a "raise me" aura sometimes. I mean, his childhood was worse than mine in some ways. Now mine sucked, like, off the Richter scale of suckage. But I swear, Heero didn’t even have a childhood. To be a soldier from day one--that musta been awful. Suckage in colour. Suckage in stereo surround sound. Perfect Soldier or no Perfect Soldier, he reminds me so much of a little kid sometimes it scares me. The way he pouts when he doesn’t get what he wants right away--he calls it a brood, but I know it’s a pout. And the way he never seems to run out of energy. The way he’s so stubborn and won’t tell you what’s wrong until you beat it out of him. He’s so cute sometimes!
Eh, he’s moving again. Probably because I’m thinking too hard and I stopped singing. Tough, I enjoy thinking about Heero, and it’s hella easier than thinking about my life. He’s the closest thing I’ve had to a family since the church blew up. Some family, I guess, but it’s good enough for me. Sad, sometimes, enough to nearly make me cry, the stuff that takes us sometimes, but I wouldn’t give it up for all the money in the world. Life may suck now, but my history is a bitch. Everyone’s history is a bitch. History in general is a bitch. What’s that old saying? Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it? Yeah, in summer school.
But we’re all just human, you know? And honestly this whole stupid thing called war is just the same fight, the same argument, the same problem over and over and over. The same kinds of people disagreeing on the same sort of problem. And then BANG, things are exploding and people are dying. We’re human, and our nature is not to ever learn from our mistakes. Our brains are no longer evolving. We remain as we were several thousand years ago.
Boy, it must be after dark, listen to me. I sound like a freaking philosophe. Hey, wasn’t the French Revolution their fault? Smart people come up with good ideas, then stupid people get a hold of them and screw them up and take over stuff. The apostles did it with the teachings of Jesus--who do you think wrote the Bible? Not Jesus. Nope, all his sidekicks, then all the other crusaders and bishops and popes and TV evangelists got a hold of that and chopped up more people. Over and over and over. We can’t win.
I bet I haven’t even learned my lesson. I’ll keep on fighting until the day I die, if only because it’s just part of who I am. Beyond the whole standing up for what you believe in shit--you can stand up for what you believe in without blowing things up! Well, sometimes then you just get blown up yourself. But I’ve been like this, fighting, like this, for a long time. Long enough that if I let it go, it will be just one less root to hold me in place. I think Heero feels that way as well, if feel is really the word to use--this is Heero after all. Ok, that’s not fair--but I’ll think about that later. Just he’s been a soldier forever, like I said. He’d go crazy… crazier? He’d lose it if he didn’t even have a good fight to keep him going. That guy’s real empty. Or real full, too, at the same time. Really full of a lot of shitty experiences and memories that he just locks away, puts aside, forgets about. So they’re separate from him, or at least the him that he is conscious of. Empty, not really, because what he’s left with after filling up his head with forgotten trash is small, and easy to fill.
That took me a long time to figure out. And it took me a long time to figure out that I really couldn’t help him. That I needed a good shrink almost as bad as he did--which of course, will have to wait, as we’re in the middle of a freaking war. I worked really hard for months trying to get him out of his shell, exhausted myself even. It worked a little. I got him to listen. He heard me. But there’s so much I can’t do.
So much of him is beyond what I can reach. So much I can’t do for him.
I feel like I’m cheating him sometimes. I know--I know, without a shadow of doubt, that he loves me. Because I care about him, and I look after him, and I hold his hair back when he’s sick and don’t talk about it after, and I represent everything that he’s not, and everything that he wants to be--short of the killer, I guess… There’s just--so much more to me, more of me that there is of him. More to love and more to hate, really. And Heero loves directly. One person at a time, like sunlight concentrated to a pinprick through a magnifying glass. He doesn’t love very many people, so who he does love gets a lot of it. And being it his love, it’s intense. It burns. Sometimes it hurts more than anything…
I’ll love anything that’ll give me reason to. And Heero did, a lot. I do love him, more that anyone. But--I’ll never be able to give him as much as he gives me. I have to give some to the others, the other pilots, my brothers. Some to Father Maxwell and Sister Helen, who can never return it again--that’s a black hole if there ever was one. Some to everyone. I can’t give it all to him like he can to me. It feels so unbalanced.
So unfair.
Nothing is as it should be, in this world. A world where adults do foolish, silly things, and the children do the fighting and the invading and the ruling. We live in dark, screwed up times. Especially us, right in the middle of it. You’d think in the eye of the hurricane it would be calm. Well, it ain’t.
We escape from it any way we can. The options are slim. Die. Lose yourself--and the memories--in drugs. Or find someone to comfort you. Who knows what pain you feel and sympathizes. Empathizes.
And that’s what I did. I found someone, namely Heero, who felt, to a certain extent, what I was feeling, who I could confide in and find comfort in, and offer comfort in return. He did most of the comforting at first, in his own way. Mostly just because it took him a while to admit that he even needed comforting, and longer still to accept it, even from me. There is more of a balance, now. We hold each other up, give each other strength, in different ways. But the energy expended is pretty equal to that taken.
Balance is the way everything should be. And for that, I guess us humans need a bit of violence to make us recognize and appreciate the peace. But as far as that goes, I have no balance. My life is like this: about three percent war, ninety five percent sitting around, tightly waiting for war—and two percent just Heero.
Like I said, times are weird. Children are killing, ruling, and doing things that only adults should have to be responsible for. And we’re only fifteen and sixteen, us pilots. We’re young. But we’re men, not boys. We’ve all done too much, seen too much, to be boys anymore. Children don’t fight wars. Children don’t kill.
And children don’t love. Not like I love Heero. Not like he loves me.
We’re too young, far too young, to do what we do. To be so close. To know so much about each other, every nook and cranny of the other’s mind, every ridge and curve of the other’s body. Adults connect like that, not children. But we have, and we do, over and over.
It’s all we have. All I have, anyway. In Heero’s arms, it’s the only time I can really, really forget about this damn war and my part in it. It’s really weird, too. It makes me so sad. I love him, and I love his body, and he can make me burn with passion and even ecstasy--but afterwards. Afterwards, it’s different. When I lie in his arms and he in mine, and I think about what awaits me when the sun comes up. Or the life I could have had, that Heero could have had. And I want to never move from where I am. I want to stay in the bed and forget about the war and the fact that I’m much to young to be so intimate with anyone. Just lie beside him and be in love with him forever. John Lennon once said that if everyone in the world just went to bed for three days, we would have world peace. Why can’t we do that?
There are moments, with Heero, where nothing matters but him. His mouth, his eyes, his body and soul fused with mine. Moments where the world burns away in white fire, and there is no pain, no agony. Only ecstatic, crazy happiness, heat and love. In those moments, there is no room in my heart for sadness or pain. Only room for Heero.
But they are fleeting. Occasional. And they become addictive, until I crave them like a drug, that escape. When they come, I want them to last forever. But they don’t. They just fade, slowly, slowly, and leave behind them a terrible empty sadness, in the knowledge that they are something that I can never have.
It hurts. It makes me cry, sometimes, and sometimes I can hold the tears back long enough for Heero to fall asleep, sometimes I can’t. When I can’t, then he holds me, but that almost makes it hurt worse. So I let him fall asleep, and I try not to wake him. And I lie there beside him, and think about other things, waiting for sleep to come, waiting for the velvet darkness to envelope me as well. It takes hours. So to keep Heero sleeping, and to keep me from thinking too much, I sing Sister Helen’s lullabies.
That’s how I got here. Sitting up naked under the thin sheets, watching Heero sleep, singing softly to him. I feel empty again. But no, don’t think about that. Just keep singing.
"Sleep my child, and peace attend thee
All through the night
Guardian angels God will lend thee
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and vale in slumber keeping
All through the night."
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m singing to Heero or myself.
I’m going to cry. I know it. I’ve thought too hard, too much. I held it off until he fell asleep, but I can’t anymore. Yep, there I go. Damn it all, I can’t even do it silently. He’ll wake up now. Wake up and panic. Don’t cry, don’t cry. Just keep singing.
I can’t. And my voice trying to sing and cry at the same time wakes him up. SNAP, his eyes are open, panicked, he doesn’t know where he is. It’ll take him a second to realize that he isn’t being attacked, but before that happens I’ll—
Have a gun to my head.
No… God… No more. Not tonight. I can’t bear to be under that penetrating blue gaze tonight. There’s no point in trying to push him off, he’s stronger than me and it will only make him take longer to figure the situation out. Just screw my eyes shut and wait for him to come to his senses, and hope that he does before his hand finds my neck.
I hear him swear, the metal is gone from my temple, the gun clicks as he puts the safety back on and again as he places it on the table beside him. Now I can hear him shifting closer to me, his voice whispering apologies in my ear, pleading, sorrowful, but it only makes me cry harder. His fingers thread in my unbound hair, stroking out the tangles he put there not so long ago. Ok, that helps. Breathe. Breathe. Don’t think.
"Are you all right, Duo?"
Breathe in. Hold it. One… two… three… four… five… "I--I’m ok."
He doesn’t believe me. No, he’s wrapping his arms around me and pulling me onto his chest. At least he isn’t talking, that would just break me. If he just holds me I should be all right.
His eyes are so blue in the dark. Like twin lasers right into my skull. But tonight… They almost--heal. Like they’re burning away pain. Eh? This is new. They hold me as securely as his arms do, not letting me look away until they can do no more. So blue. Isn’t blue the colour of serenity? Of calm, cool water and cleansing? Who’d have thought the Perfect Soldier would have such beautiful eyes…
His lips move, is he saying something? I can’t tell, but that’s not important, because I have to kiss those lips, right now, or I’ll lose it. He jumps, not expecting it, but kisses me back, so soft. Should I cry? But for sadness or happiness? I feel them both so sharply right now. Hot and cold, happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain. His arms tighten around me, holding me snug against him. His fingers slide on my skin. That moment, I need that moment. I don’t care if I had it once already tonight! It’s an addiction. I need a fix. A fix of Heero, and the painkiller he is. Like heroin. Like morphine.
I need to forget. I need to not think. And only he can make me stop thinking.
Mais ce soir tu t’endors
Comme un ange dans mes bras.
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