Title: Different Paths
Rating: PG
Pairings: gen, hints of Heero/Duo if you squint.
Warnings: Platonic het kiss.

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Maxwell and Schbeiker Salvage.

She found the stamp while cleaning out her office drawers one day. It was buried right in the far back, underneath the bushels of pencils and old, empty envelopes. One of those self-inking contraptions that you could press down on a sheet of paper to leave your details.

A birthday present if she wasn't mistaken. A strange thing to receive for your 21st but it had signified a lot at the time and had meant the world to her. Out of curiosity she tried it out on the back of an old invoice, not sure whether she should be surprised or not to see that it was still in prime working order.

After all, it hadn't been long after it was bought that it became obsolete.

She ran a finger across the stamp, smudging the 'axwe' across the paper in a smooth diagonal stroke. Then she crumpled it and threw it in the trash with the rest of the old papers.

It was the only sign of his existence she'd seen in years.

He wouldn't let her take his photograph. Not at the spaceport, nor at the beach, not even when she wanted to place employee portraits on the wall of their little junkyard office. At the time she'd thought it was because of post war nerves. Now, the cynical side of her said it was because he knew he wasn't going to be sticking it out for all that long and he'd wanted to leave as few reminders as possible behind himself.

Bitter? Oh hell yes.

Well, she had been.

Not now though.

To be honest, she didn't really think of him much anymore. Sure he'd come into her life like the devil was on his heels. He'd turned all of her ideals - and she'd had a lot of them at the time - on their heads with barely even a snap of his fingers. She'd even gone to bat for him. But that had been then and this was now.

As a fifteen year old girl, her plan in life had been to 'make it to the end of the war in one piece'. After that had been completed with relative success, she was suddenly left bereft, her plan empty and a damn sight longer than she'd ever had before.

Boyfriends, marriage, kids... all things she'd never thought about before. All things she'd figured she'd have plenty of time to sort out later.

Only later never seemed to arrive.

At the age of twenty one he kissed her. They'd both been drunk, celebrating her birthday in style, and the chaste, platonic cheek kiss he'd started with turned into lip on lip, open mouth. No tongue though, she'd pulled back, or perhaps he had, before that happened. He'd looked puzzled, running his fingers through her hair, long in front, short in back, with the air of a man who'd just figured something out.

It had been soft, a lingering touch, a reverent one.

And not meant for her.

It had been a hell of a way to sober up.

The next morning she'd been full of contrition, apologising for leading him on, telling him she was worried that they'd been going too fast. She'd been awake all night, she said, scared that she was on that slippery slope to matrimony and all the rest of the familial entrapments.

He had apologies for her too. He was going to leave for a while. He needed to think things through. He was going to Earth to visit his friend, the one named after the colony martyr.

She wondered if Duo's friend still went by that name now or if he'd finally chosen another for himself. She wondered if he had, did it have Maxwell anywhere in it. She wondered when had she got so bitter.

Most of all she wondered, as she tucked the stamp back into the drawer, why the one thing she didn't feel from the whole mess of it all was regret.

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END

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