Title: Octopus
Author: Link Worshiper
Pair: 1=2
Stuff: Duo POV, angst, drug abuse, trippiness or something? But mostly angst... and that open-ended thing you all hate.
Disclaimer: I'm really not as creative as you all seem to think: no way I'd ever come up with something as cool as Gundam.

Working on that portrait of Heero inspired by The Madcap Laughs got me thinking about something Syd once said about potential. Let's see if I can make it work. This is like a Floyd-Barret-Pumpkins fest somehow.

++++

"When I woke up today,
And you weren't there to play...."

In the midnight air, I could hear him singing. I closed my book, got out of bed, no longer able to read, and moved towards the window of my small, one-room apartment. Resting my elbows on the sill, I leaned out, hoping I might see him and the old guitar that warbled next to his deep voice. In all my years of knowing Heero Yuy, I never knew he liked music until we moved to this old tenant house by the sea. I taught him some chords on the beach one day and he took my guitar. When he plays, no one speaks.

"...Then I wanted to be with you."

I'm not sure peacetime was as easy for Heero as anyone would have hoped. Not that I can say I'm doing much better, but I don't care much about me. I think that without the sense of purpose that had driven him through the war, he was left horrendously empty. Now he spent his days as if he were trying to make up for lost time - to be something he might have been a long time ago if he never was a soldier. I can't say that I never wonder the same thing, sometimes. Maybe we could have met another way, strangers on the street, classmates - friends.

The ocean crashed loudly against the rocky precipice the tenant house was perched upon, and I realized it was the only sound in my ears. I leaned out the window further, my long braid of hair flapping out in the sea breeze as I tried to catch sight of Heero through the bay window that graced his room. I was disappointed to instead find only a drawn curtain fluttering loosely through the opened pane where he might have once been perched moments before.

His room, next door to mine, was hardly a few paces down the hall, but he hardly ever ventured outside of it, even to see me. Usually it ended up being me who made that journey, and usually, we'd just lie there and waste the day as far out of our minds as we could get.

I knocked on the door and promptly opened it afterwards, knowing he never locked the damn thing. Unsurprisingly, he was lying on the plain mattress he kept on the floor, a raft upon the sea of floorboards he'd painted orange and purple upon moving in. With a pile of stereo equipment and my old guitar floating in the middle of the room and a haphazard existence that lived out of crates and baskets, I'm not sure that anyone else we'd known during the war would quite recognize this place as the one where Heero lived. But truthfully, I think Heero had always been a bit elusive for every single one of them. Sometimes I thought maybe even for me, too, but at least Heero and I shared a passive attachment to reality that I'm fairly certain was unique to the pair of us. It kind of made me happy that we both could be strange together: we could watch the world devour itself in its own misery, peacetime or otherwise.

I wasn't surprised that he was already blown out, but I was glad to think I wouldn't be too far behind him. He was breathing softly and staring up at the ceiling, a sated smile on his face as if he were happy just to be still breathing. He looked to me like the pale prince of a shattered palace, broken yet somehow relieved by his freedom. It was as if this newfound silence was what allowed him to dream - or perhaps what allowed him to find an unheard of symphony.

"Digging to feel something new?" I asked, sidling onto the edge of the mattress beside him. I slipped an arm across his stomach, knowing he wouldn't bat it away and pressed my chin against his shoulder. I espied an opened bottle of sunshine lying forgotten next to his head and I went ahead and helped myself.

He didn't outright answer me immediately, instead still mumbling words to the tune I'd heard from him earlier: "When I lay awake at night seeing stars high and light, then I wanted to be with you...."

The words were somewhat hazy, but they still danced in my ears and it made me want to lean over and kiss him, which I did fondly. Heero had never really minded when I touched him, but it still always came as a surprise to me that he'd also let me kiss him, too. When I think about it in retrospect, I kind of figure that maybe it was something I should have picked up on earlier, but with the way Heero was so apt to play his hand close to the chest, I can hardly be blamed for remaining generally obtuse to his preferences. It took some solitude and a trip to coax it out of him, but I can safely recall our first kiss being of his own volition, not mine.

Moonlit butterflies danced over his cheek and I tried to catch them with my fingertips while he blinked softly back at me in the darkness. Leave it to two of the most fucked up has-beens you ever did see to find romance in the darkness, but I truly felt a calm like I've never known whenever we lay together like this, sailing. And at the end of our voyage, when we'd finally grow weary of kissing colours, we'd curl up together, two barren-hearted warriors on a calm ocean devoid of our fears, again to sleep, perchance to dream.

++++

"When the rooftops shone dark, all alone...."

I woke again to the sound of his voice. We were still lying on his mattress and though I was still kind of strung out, I groggily tried to sit up. Almost immediately, I felt his hand tighten around my wrist, and I glanced back at Heero, still lying perfectly still on his back, his eyes so empty, it seemed like he could see everything. He kept his fingers locked tightly around my forearm like a blind person grasping for a steadfast rock, even as he spoke. "You drained it," he said.

"What?" I mumbled, tiredly running my fingers through my stiff bangs as my eyes scanned the floor for the sunshine bottle.

"Your potential," he said, his grip tightening more urgently around my wrist. "It trickled out of your body as if it were a sieve the moment you sat up."

"I don't understand," I replied with a shake of my head.

Heero lifted my hand and jerked me back down onto my back. He moved enough to reach for Sandoz and press her back into my skull, but even that was hardly a twitch of his one arm. "If we just lay here with our eyes closed, never moving, then we could be anything," he went on, his voice echoing around me as my mind started to regenerate its wings. "The instant you get up, you've committed to something, and it's gone. You might have been a sailor if you stayed in bed. Or maybe a comet, or a snail... or even a good person. The impossible is possible - you don't have to be stuck in vain."

"Oh," I hummed, flattening myself on the mattress beside him once more and staring up at the rafters. They looked to me like they were writhing, but lethargically, perhaps like an octopus's tentacles across the ocean floor, bubbles of sunlight and starfish mold. "Heero," I said, letting my eyes unfocus as my sense of place rapidly dispersed, "where are you?"

"The wind blew me high, up to the most pinhole of stars," he answered with dogged assurance. "I'm hanging from Orion's belt and holding myself up to the light. It's one of the indescribable moments of my life."

"I remember flying," I said as the octopus tentacles curled into a more galactic shape, following me through a swirl of nimbi and moondust to lay across the haze of the purple heavens. My hand sought Heero's like I might fall back through the stratosphere without its reassuring grip: "I loved flying with you," I said.

His fingers tightened around mine again and his lips started to move around his late night song again. "When we grow very tall, when I saw you small," he murmured slowly as so each word could find a shape in the air; "Then I wanted to be with you...."

I could see the secrets of the world, so hard to understand, completely etched onto his heart and drawn into the lines of his face. He was ordinary, just like everyone, and yet, it was like he knew the meaning of it all. I wondered if he thought we were meant for this world - this world we couldn't live without. Absently, I considered aloud whether his words came from those very thoughts and visions he saw so clearly beneath his eyelids.

"Even if the sun refused to shine, if the clouds refused to rain or the world refused to turn - if clocks would hesitate... in my sky, all I see is you." His voice was soft when he spoke, and even though his eyes were still those fathomless blue holes, I felt as if he were looking directly at me - or perhaps even already within me. It brought me to life even as my reality continued to tilt, giving me something to hold dear to my heart. "It's why I came to see you again before I came here," he said. There was a pause and then he asked me in that same dreamy monotone, "Why did you follow me?"

I might have shrugged, but the answer was still spoken with the same sincerity, even as the colours of our beings started to meld together. "Because I wanted to try and hold on," I said. "Even if it was just a little bit longer, that's all."

"It's not too late to turn back," he murmured wistfully.

I knew he could see through the windowpane, so I didn't even bother trying to rein it in. "We're still alive, skinned knees and all," I said as the cosmos turned beneath us. "My wish to die by your side is no different now that than it was back during our aerial days." I rolled my head to the side, examining his profile as a two-tone purple and orange rainbow traced its delicate contour: "I want to love you when you're happy - to be there when you're sad," I said. Reaching for my chest, I clenched my shirt vehemently and added, "I'd tear my heart out for you."

"You make what you want of me," Heero said, swallowing the rainbow as his lips moved. "I'll keep you anyway."

This time, when I kissed him, I held an armful of stars, and when he kissed me back, I tasted moonlight. That night, as we made love upon a pillow of winds, it was like we fit just right, even with all the certainties we'd left behind. The sky would hold us this way forever - forever frozen, beautiful, forever lost inside ourselves.

++++

I closed my book and woke up alone on the mattress. I could still hear his voice and the twang of guitar strings twirling in my ears, to appear to disappear. There was peace running through my head and dripping from my nostrils, colouring my vision. I could see the octopus creeping across the cloudy ceiling again, obscuring the dripping ink wash, and it was then that I knew the silence of the world, even as I screamed into the last divine. Youth was wasted on the young.

"Inside, I feel alone and unreal,
And the way you kiss will always be
A very special thing to me...."


I don't think I'll get up again.

++++

END

++++