Till There Was You
Part 1: Awakening
by Lady Scarlet-Une
Our meeting, like many other fateful events throughout history, was by pure chance. Heero had been working for the Preventers for several years now and had been studiously avoiding me for an amount of time roughly equal to that. I let him. In fact, I even went out of my way at times to avoid him. It's easier to cling to delusions of grand romance when the object of your affection isn't literally or figuratively shooting you down. But, like all good things, our luck eventually ran out. In retrospect, I wonder if maybe that's when Lady Luck actually kicked in. Whatever the cause, we suddenly found ourselves face to face one night at some faceless official function.
"Heero."
"Relena."
I drank him in with hungry eyes, as clichÈd as that may sound. As fruitful as my imagination had been, none of my mental conjuring - of him both naked and not - could ever compare to the real thing. I tried to act nonchalant.
"So how're you doing, Heero?" I said brightly. He looked at me oddly.
"Fine."
As taciturn as ever. "Here with anyone?"
"Yes. Her."
"I looked across the glitzy ballroom and spotted a tall lean woman in a red sheath dress. I mentally raised an eyebrow. Heero's taste in women sure had matured.
"She's very beautiful," I replied honestly. I was quite proud of myself. No theatrics, no tears, nada. Those were for later in the privacy of my own room with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
"Yes she is," he replied evenly. I turned my gaze back in his direction and found him looking at me intently.
"What is it, Heero?" I asked calmly, though somewhat unnerved. He continued to stare at me oddly for awhile longer.
"How are you, Relena?" Truthfully, I was quite taken aback by his question. Heero was not one for social pleasantries and he had never shown any personal concern for my well being before. Granted he had saved my life on various occassions, but that was only so I could help save the world and all that crap.
"I-I'm fine," I stuttered back.
"Are you really?"
I was quite thrown by his question. My eyes narrowed. What was he implying? God knows I hadn't stalked him lately, so this couldn't be a jibe about my mental health. Could he know about my newfound dissatisfaction with the status quo's version of peace and love and goodwill towards men? Of course not. There --
"Heero," a voice purred from somewhere behind me. I watched the lady in the red dress glide up to him and possessively - but gracefully - grab his arm. I mentally rolled my eyes and made gagging noises. "Who are you talking to, darling?"
Heero calmly extricated his arm from her death grip and moved one step away. "Gwyneth, this is Vice Minister Relena Darlian. Relena, this is my associate, Gwyneth Warton."
"A pleasure," I replied politely and reached out to shake her hand. She ignored my hand and, after a quick assessment of my outfit and being from top to bottom, promptly ignored the rest of me. She turned to Heero instead and transformed into full vamp mode.
"Heero baby," she began, her voice low and seductive, "I think it's time to go home now." She ran her lacquered nails up his arm lightly. "I'm kind of...tired." Heero brushed her hand off him once more.
"I'll drive you home then," he replied coldly. He looked at me one last time before he turned to go. "Relena."
"Heero." We stared at each other intently before he broke eye contact and walked off with Gwyneth in tow. I sighed and turned around. 'I'll just kill her in all my delusions, that's all,' I thought wryly.
I hit the bottle as soon as I got home.
***
The mornings after excessive alcoholic binges are never pleasant. The usual surprises one can encounter during one of these lovely instances include nausea, blood shot eyes, cotton mouth, and debilitating, mind-numbing headaches. I had all this and more so. I also had a cabinet board meeting. Thus I found myself dressed in my god-awful white French-revival dignitary outfit fighting a hangover at 8 a.m. in the bloody morning. On and on they droned, recycling the same old rhetoric and pleas for aid for such and such a humanitarian cause. Pacifism good! Pacifism great! I fought the urge to throw up on my meeting brief.
"I say, Vice Minister Darlian. Did you hear my question?"
My head shot up. Damn. I had been caught. "I'm sorry, Prime Minister Erikson. I'm afraid I was thinking about something else," I replied sweetly. "Could you please repeat the question?" Erikson beamed back at me. They didn't take me as seriously as they said they did. I was only twenty, after all. And a cute little missy girl to boot. Chauvinist bastards.
"Why of course, Vice Minister Darlian! I was merely pontificating upon the deplorable situation in Bruinda and how all our gestures have been ignored by the warring factions. What do you think we should do?"
I didn't miss a beat. "Send Mobile suits in to destroy their military force. Then install a puppet government to keep them in line." I narrowed my eyes. "Destroy all dissenters."
My statement, predictably, was met with stunned silence. I may have dropped the word Peacecraft from my name, but the legacy was still there. As well as all the connotations associated with the name Darlian and my own track record. Suddenly, Erikson burst into jovial laughter, laughing so hard and long that he clutched his sides and had to lean on the table to keep from falling off his chair. I looked around the room and noticed similar amused expressions on the faces of the other old bastards.
"That was a fine jest, Darlian!" Erikson chortled. He chuckled a bit more. "Almost had me going there for a minute. His laughter subsided into an amused smile. I looked around the room and smiled sweetly at all the men present.
"Yes. Sometimes I even surprise myself."
***
After the meeting, I went to my office and stared blankly at the gardens below my office windows. The last three hours had been representative of my whole damn political career. As disillusioned as I had been after the war with OZ, I had still believed that true unity and peace via some convoluted form of pacifism would come about in the end. But my years in politics had told me otherwise. Wars were still breaking out globally, though their scales were quite small and localized. It was always about the same things: power, money, domination, all those other mind games that people play to prove themselves superior over someone or another. As minor as these skirmishes were, the official advocacy of pacifism by the Earth Sphere Unified Nation made it difficult to quell their uprisings. It's hard to fight gun-toting guerrillas when you don't have any weapons, after all. There was definitely too much uncontrolled power out there. I turned around and strode to my desk. I punched a button on my phone.
"Get me Heero Yuy," I ordered curtly.
"Yes Miss Relena." I smiled at myself in self-mockery. How many times had I dreamed of saying that? The mental product usually involved a red bow around his neck and a leopard print thong, though. I'd have to settle for a Preventers uniform in this case. If he even showed up at all.
Heero walked into my office half an hour later. I watched him enter from my position behind the desk. I got up slowly and walked to meet him. We gazed at each other silently, both sporting our best poker faces.
"Heero."
"Relena."
I looked deep into his eyes. And then, without a word, I wrapped an arm around his neck and kissed him.
***
Much later, I turned to him and asked, "Why did you avoid me?" He gazed back at me implacably from the pillow beside mine. "I know you loved me."
"We were different then, Relena. You were caught up in your ideals and ghosts and I was too deep into mine." He fingered a lock of my now unbound hair. "I knew what would happen to you, Relena. And I knew that when you finally realized what you really wanted, you'd call me. So I bided my time."
I looked at his dear face hovering intimately near mine. I wasn't surprised by his revelation. Heero was a very intuitive man, after all. I gently placed a hand on his cheek.
"So what now?" He leaned over and brushed his lips against mine. My hand moved from his cheek to the back of his neck. He slid a hand under my back and squeezed gently.
"Now it begins." I closed my eyes and went under.