Lethe

[outflewtheweb]

Title: Lethe
Word Count: 2657
Rating: PG-13 for hints of suicide and etc.
Pairing: 1x2, hints of others
Fandom: Gundam Wing, which I don't own.
Author's Notes: Sorry about the ten thousand endings - I have never been able to decide.
Beta:masterofmidgets

            The river Lethe really was where they’d said it would be, and it was so much easier to get to than the bottom of whatever glass he’d been looking in the night before. Once you knew it existed, had felt it on your fingers, you were called to it. And it was always a short walk away.

            This was the third time he’d knelt in the sand beside the river, and watched it flow past. Once he’d seen a shadow, as if someone else was there, but it hardly mattered. Anyone who came to this river came to forget, and nothing else.

            He hadn’t drunk, yet, although it was becoming something of a game with him to reach towards the cup, curl his fingers around it, even to fill it and feel the water drip over his fingers before he set it down beside him again to watch the water. That, he supposed, was what kept him from drinking – those pictures. Memories, he supposed, of everyone who’d ever drunk… and everyone who’d ever died. An infinity of pain, and he assumed an infinity of relief when the pain was gone. There were other memories too, though. Things he was sure he’d never want to forget, and couldn’t imagine that others had wanted to. But maybe they thought that the cleansing, that would be enough.

            A color caught his eye.

            Black, black everywhere, and a coffin, closed, because the body inside was burned past recognition. A woman, so still she’d seem dead if she weren’t standing. He couldn’t see her face. He swore that the arsonist that killed his brother would pay.

            Three boats are on a river, and he is on the shore. Long chestnut hair catches the sunlight, and he hears a laugh as the brunette waves at him.

            Ice. His own dreams were of fire. Thick, so heavy, and inside, children frozen until the thaw. He ran down the slope, but they were still there, still with him. His fault. The hatred was deserved, but it hurt.

            A meadow, with tall purple spikes of flowers and horses, and beside him in the tree is warmth, snuggled against him. There were no meadows here, but this… it looked like something from his childhood. The childhood he sort of thought he occasionally remembered, even though he’d grown up in a colony. Even though he was no longer human, and had no firm memories of ever being so.

She was always first, brilliant, beautiful, drew everyone to her. She never had a chance. The military engulfed her, and he held her as she was eaten from the inside out by some new weapon. At least his talent had never seemed worthwhile beside hers. At least he wasn’t in her place, he thought, and nearly broke from the guilt. He could’ve stopped it, he could’ve been friends with her instead of a resentful rival, he could have held her more, and he had not done. Now she was dying. It was an end he’d never thought to see. A wave of sick triumph, guilt, sorrow, horror, misery, and he wept for his own warping as much as for her and for their end.

            Tears, and he was on his knees begging, pleading, his words just ‘please, please, forgive’ and no excuses, because he deserved it, how he deserved this rejection for the abuse and betrayal, but how it hurt. It was no surprise to him when he returned home, rejected, and found his house on fire.

            A child. This, again. Was he going to be forced to watch as another did what he had done? Here, as well as in his dreams? He’d found that once one started watching the memories of others, one could not leave until released.

A child, and the walls were burning. A young woman watched him and tried to hold the children behind her, to protect them, and even though he was bound to kill them, he reached out his hand and told them to follow, saw them safe to the edge, just in time to see a small rebel he’d missed shoot his best friend, because he hadn’t been there to protect him, because he had been kind. When he woke up in the middle of the burning town the next night, he felt as though he’d been swimming in blood, and in his hand was a child’s head.

It was worse, worse even than anything he’d done or dreamed. That was a memory worth the forgetting, even though the memory that followed was sweet, a sense of being held by his lover in the sunlight.

            He was beside the river again, out of the memories, and he breathed in the strange air, so heavy, mineral and damp, with the threads of herbs whispering through. So much misery. How many lives had he just seen? To live more through more than one of those events… he had lived through more than one life’s worth of horror, more than one nightmare. He had done as much, felt as much. Death, jealousy, hatred, sickness, murder – he was not even thirty, and it was so much. He wasn’t even twenty-five.

            What he’d seen in this review was similar in proportion to his own life – misery, so much misery, and it outweighed the number of the good things by far, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to give up what he had got, anyway. He’d only have so much time to make good memories, and if he’d erased all the ones he had, that would be so many of them wasted. He imagined losing the memories, all his memories, of his lover, from the first time he’d seen him (which admittedly was not such a great memory, come to think of it, but it was so very Duo that he wouldn’t want to lose it anyway) to his latest memory of the boy laughing as he painted a wall, dancing on a ladder. Such a waste, and he would have no memories of Duo remaining at all. To do that to him was as bad as what the man in the vision had done to his lover – an abandonment and a hurt past simple healing.

            If he were to stand up and walk away, if he decided not to drink, then it would be a promise to never again fall into depression, never sit at his desk by his computer with a gun before him, never contemplate the medicine cabinet or the chest full of explosives that he hadn’t found himself able to get rid of, despite his promises to live as a civilian lives, to stop fighting. It would be a promise to stop thinking about the past, an oath and a vow to live contentedly with his mind on the present – on Duo. He would stop questioning his humanity, and accept that what Duo had told him was true, that because he cried when he remembered, because he laughed sometimes, he was human.

            Really, when he thought about it, he was reasonably happy with who he was and where he was at in his life. He loved his work and his home and living on Earth where one could go for a walk and not run into a wall. And the nightmares weren’t so bad now; Duo always woke him up before the worst of it. He knew the worst of it, too.

            That was one thing that was hard to understand about Duo. He’d done as much as Heero, he’d suffered as much and seen the same things, but he never doubted for one moment his humanity. His nightmares had slowly petered out; now he only had one occasionally, and it was much less sharp and painful. When questioned, Duo presented him with a small book and when opened, it fell immediately to the page where the words “think on the past only as it gives you pleasure” were underlined. Heero couldn’t believe that that was the entire secret – the past had a way of knocking him down and tying him to a post to get his attention. It was, at this point, pretty much the only thing that could.

            Maybe Duo just tried harder. Maybe because he accepted that the past existed, and remembered that bad things had happened, he could live with them. Heero could not accept what he’d done in the past, and could not forgive himself – but then, neither could Duo. He’d said that very casually. Maybe his philosophy was that that person, the person who had done those things, was him, but he had changed and he had moved on and the person he was then was not the whole of who he was now. Duo, also, would not change a thing. Asked, he’d stared at the wall for a while, thinking of the worst things of his past, then, a little wistfully, he’d shaken his head and said that without those events, he had no idea where he’d end up. He might have had a far worse life. He might be dead. As it was, life was good and who he was, that was good too, and the only thing that bothered him was his lover’s constant melancholy and preoccupation with death.

            It hadn’t been fair at all to Duo, really. He had been very trying, and Duo had always been patient – as patient as Duo could be, at any rate – and didn’t try to push him one way or another. Duo was resilient, and Duo was kind, and he thought that the worst thing that could happen was for Duo to decide that he was not worth the effort and not worth the pain. To leave. No; that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing would be for Duo to become like he had been.

 

Ending 1

            And there was a chance, vague as it might seem, that if Heero disappeared, Duo would fall into the same depression he had fallen into. That the loss of him would be a death sentence to his lover. He wasn’t vain enough to say it was certain or selfish enough to want Duo to follow him wherever he went, out of time, memory or life, but there was a possibility. He stood, and looked one last time at the river before he would leave it and never return. He never could return. Once you decided, it wasn’t an option anymore. Smiling at the thought of never coming back, of never seeing the horror of other people’s lives before, of never wandering the edge of the river between life and death again, he turned, and felt two hands push lightly on his shoulder as he spun, just enough to send him over. Just enough time, too, before he forgot, to see Duo’s tears as he watched Heero’s face go blank and Duo had to walk away.

Ending 2

            If he stayed, then he’d drag Duo down with him. He was worthless; completely and absolutely worthless and his presence was nothing but a plague. Already they were tired of dragging his ass out of depression and self-destruction. It was time to stop being a pain, and time to stop wavering on the edge. He waded purposefully out into the middle of the river, and as he lay down and the memories washed over him, he realized as he forgot his life and all the others, that once again he’d chosen to forget.

Ending 3

            He continued to stare into the river. An endless choice, and in five more minutes, whatever that meant here, he’d go or fall in, and that’d be that. Whatever came to his mind, in those five minutes… four minutes… three minutes and it seems like maybe, just maybe he can make a choice… two minutes and he’s closer to a decision… one minute remaining, and hands grab his shoulder, and he doesn’t ever decide because the river disappears and he’ll never see it again. It’s simply time he accepted that his life has always been under the control of someone else.

Ending 4

            In the end, the choice was simple. A new life, in a new universe, which he could fill with new mistakes, or the life he knew and the mistakes he knew and Duo, always Duo. How could he leave Duo, how could he leave him without telling him and let him grieve and never know whether Heero had left or Heero had died – that was worse than the endless days of silence in a house Duo loved to be full of music and various things clashing and clattering as he made his chaotic way around, or the sullen rage and the forgetting to eat and the refusal to leave or think or do anything but sit or lay in bed and stare blankly at the wall, haunted by memories and guilt. Given the power to choose, it would only be selfish to choose the easy way. From now on, he was going to handle his life like a life and not a sentence. As he stood and made his way up the bank away from the river, he remembered the memories, and shivered, because suddenly he realized that they weren’t really someone else’s horrible pasts. They were his own, an endless cycle of death and destruction and never finishing, never having the courage to just keep going and make something of what he’d been given. Now, though, he was going to live like he meant it, and this time he hadn’t taken the coward’s way out. This time, he’d broken the chain, and he could live unhaunted, because this time, he wasn’t going to come back around. When he died, he’d die for good. It was about time.

Ending 5

            Resolution gathered, and in another moment he would know, he would finally know what he was going to do, if he chose his old life or a new life, and it would be decided and he would simply be. He waited, and the epiphany seemed ready, any moment, a heavy weight and a light one simultaneously, like the feeling of rain before it falls. Under his foot, a stone shifted, and before he could choose, he fell in and oh, his life flashed before his eyes all right – how could it not? All the times someone else or some random thing chose for him, every time every important or unimportant decision he had was taken from him, from his life before J to the last time Quatre ordered his food for him, and his final emotion before he began again was an infinite frustration and rage that even this could not be his choice.

Ending 6

            Hn. Duo would hate him, no matter where he ended up after he finally died, for abandoning him like that. And didn’t he finally have a choice? A choice no one else could take from him or make for him and didn’t that mean that once he left, his life would also be his, since he’d decided whether or not to keep it? If he left, then everything from then on was entirely under his control, and the past, which hadn’t been, he couldn’t allow to haunt him anymore, because he truly hadn’t ever had a life. He’d always been governed by what others did to him and made him do and he’d taken responsibility for all the things he’d done just because they told him to, and that was right, but he’d been a child and he hadn’t been able to choose, and it just wasn’t right. He stood, and left, and as he walked he looked like a man who belonged in his body and knew exactly what he wanted, not defiant, not pleading, simply there and present.

            When he got home, the explosives and guns were going to Preventor’s HQ and the medicine chest would be reduced to a normal first-aid kit.

            It was about time.