Author: Sparkle Itamashii
Title: Inheritance
Warnings: Respect the rating. Please see my profile.
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing A/C is NOT MINE.
Epilogue
That was the end of it. I'd retrieved the security video and shown it to the entire world. I accessed every available network so that no one, anywhere, would not know what had happened. I put it on television, both in homes and in offices, on the sides of buildings and in cars. I'd put it on computers as people were doing other things and on vid-screens as people were making phone calls. Anything electrical that could create an image was usurped for half an hour while the video aired and told the world how it had been saved by one man's sacrifice.
They spoke of it for weeks afterwards.
An investigation was made, to prove the validity of the video. The incineration building was inspected to high heaven but there was no tampering, no evidence that Duo had done anything other than exactly what he had said he'd done. Afterwards, Trowa dropped out of contact with everyone for a while and the laboratory workshops mysteriously disappeared into violent explosions during his absence.
When he returned, he never spoke of it and I never asked.
I didn't care.
I spent half a year not knowing what to do with myself. I found myself awake in the middle of the night waiting for him to come back to bed, or caught myself cooking for more than one. Artemis knew he was gone; she wandered the house aimlessly, poking her nose into every room before returning to me as if to ask why I was the only one left. I didn't have a way to explain to her that her 'dad' wasn't coming back. I didn't even want to admit it to myself.
Eventually I had gotten the courage to call the number Milliardo had given me. I wasn't ready to handle having a child back in the house, but I couldn't live alone. Not anymore, not since I'd met Duo. It was too quiet, too lonely without someone there and having Mara back under my care would at least give me something to do.
My call only reached an answering service which told me I would be directed to the proper affiliate, thank you, have a good day! It hadn't taken me long to look up the service and find the number, or the person to which it was attached. Unfortunately it didn't redirect the call to a new number; the person who rented the service had to pick up the messages.
Of course, it wasn't very hard to find the area where he had most recently checked the messages and after that it was only another hour of data gathering, a shuttle ticket, and a three block walk to get her from him. I had to smile when I arrived, though. Despite how it may have seemed I was a step ahead of him, he had her packed and waiting for me when I got there. He'd known I was coming because he'd known what I would do. He'd left a trail only I would care or know to follow.
"You're welcome," he'd said before I could thank him.
"Thank you," I'd told him gently as I hoisted her into my arms.
He only smiled. "You're welcome for that too."
I returned his smile at the subtle invitation to come back and visit now that I knew where he was. Later, I knew, I might take him up on it but for then I left after bidding farewell to him and Noin. Mara had waved to them and then wrapped her arms around my neck, burrowing her nose in the crook of it. She'd been asleep before I even reached the shuttle.
At first, having her back in the house was a constant, painful reminder of the fact that Duo was not there. I had to put her in one of the daycares I had checked into when she first came to live with us and it was hard to leave her behind every day. She should have been home with me or with Duo. He should have been there, doing all of it with me, experiencing every new problem, every new joy with me.
Instead I found myself on my own, just like I had begun life.
I can't say it was entirely terrible having her around the house. She had the brightest smile and a softness reminiscent of her mother in her actions. While she talked a good deal more than Relena ever had, I could see that her stories were growing out of the incoherent babble stage and beginning to become entertaining. Slowly she was learning when to speak and when to give a silent, knowing stare that said she could wait until she got what she wanted.
For her part, Artemis adored her thoroughly, abandoning sleeping at the foot of my bed for sleeping almost on top of her in hers. Mara didn't seem to mind in the least; I found her comfortably buried into Artemis' fluffy side most mornings. They palled around in the backyard and romped together in the park on the nicer of the days. The fall brought so many tracked-in leaves from the two of them that I thought I may as well give up trying to clean them out.
She had less time once fall ended, though. I enrolled her in a preschool that kept her occupied for several hours after I came back from work. She enjoyed it there, although she was much farther along than many of the other kids. Sometimes I left work and went straight over there so I could watch her playing with her friends. I smiled most often when I was there, watching her make up games and run the playground as though she'd been appointed leader.
But fall faded into winter eventually and winter was the hardest time of the year for me. I had gotten so used to celebrating "The Holidays" with Duo, upon his insistence. It would have been the first Christmas since I'd met him that I hadn't spent with him. I cleaned the house and bought a little Christmas tree that shed little green needles all over the carpet. I bought some presents for Mara and wrapped them as best as I could for having never really done it previously. I didn't figure it would outlast her prying fingers very long anyhow.
It wasn't until Quatre called and wanted to know if Mara and I wanted to come for Christmas Eve dinner that I found the strength to close myself in my room and cry.
It was the first and only time I'd done so since the night I received his last words in my little electronic mailbox.
The letter arrived exactly three weeks after that horrible night. It was addressed to me in a simple font and it came without tear streak or warning. At first I thought he must be alive and my heart thrummed with the adrenaline of the realization. It wasn't until I had read actually laid eyes to the first line that I recognized the signature of a time-delayed email. It wasn't until my eyes were so blurred with tears and my throat so tight I couldn't breathe that I pushed myself away from the computer without finishing reading and curled up on the bed, on his side of the bed, as close to him as I would ever get again.
I never read the end of the letter. I couldn't. It's still there, waiting.
Things were a little easier once winter began to wane and the cold disappeared. It was easier to go outside and find something to do after work when the sun was shining and the green of Earth was beginning to bloom once more. Mara got out of 'school' for the summer, to prepare for her first year of kindergarten. I wouldn't really have known much about what to do with her in so far as school if Quatre hadn't breached the topic.
I wouldn't have known a lot of things if Quatre hadn't been around to help. I know I would have failed to pull everything together like I did. In the time following Duo's death, he was so careful not to let me close myself off, as was my first inclination. He called as often as his work would allow him to have spare time and made sure I met up with someone else if he was unable to see me at least a couple times a month.
That was part of why he was over now. The art faire had come back to town for the week and its arrival marked the one year anniversary I never thought I would have to celebrate; or more accurately, dread.
It seemed so…
It was hard to imagine that it had been a whole year already.
The world seemed to have become too normal too quickly this time.
I sighed, looking down to where he played so gaily with Mara on the floor. Artemis was locked in the backyard while Quatre was inside, so that she wouldn't get in his way. She was very protective of Mara and it sometimes made Quatre nervous. Mara was halfway kneeling on him now with both hands on his shoulders and a story on her lips about how we had already been to the faire once already and she would show him everything there so he wouldn't get lost. It was simple. It was clean and safe and… normal.
I guess not everything had gone back to normal, though. Trowa still disappeared and Wu Fei hadn't been in contact for months; we hadn't spoken since I saw him on Christmas Eve at Quatre's house. I had learned to watch the news for myself, seeing as Duo wasn't around to give me the important details. From the reports I saw now and again, it seemed as though Trowa and Wu Fei were picking up where Duo left off; they were cleaning up what was left of the mess. Or perhaps, as I sometimes thought as I watched those reports, they were making a bigger one as they tied off each loose end.
Across the colonies people were being killed. Anyone associated with the doctors too closely was being picked off, slowly but surely. Anyone that might have possibly known more than they should have about the virus - anyone that could have later been dangerous - was being murdered. At first I had thought it was a new faction, someone who didn't believe the video contained truth. Who-ever it was, they were being thorough to the point of being meticulously fearsome. Already people, important people, people close to me had died.
Howard. Pagan. Mrs. Darlian.
Darlian had come as a shock to everyone, even myself. I hadn't known that she had any sort of connection to the virus or the antidote. I hadn't been aware that she had been any more involved than unwittingly adopting the last surviving Peacecraft female. Apparently she had known access codes to the original labs and while Duo and I were tramping about in the colonies, she had handed them over to the appropriate parties to allow them to get into the facility. She had wanted to aid the investigation that was underway for her adopted daughter's untimely death, and now she was dead as well for her troubles.
But the killing hadn't stopped there.
Last weekend the doctors had turned up dead, slaughtered inside a hotel room rented out to an alias that didn't exist and wasn't able to be traced. Whoever was doing it, whoever had done that to them, was good. Very good. Better, even, than the guy who had killed Relena. Only a handful of people had ever been able to slip through my fingers while I was tracking them. Only the dangerous ones. Duo. Trowa. Noin. Milliardo, for a time.
When the killings first began, before anyone I'd known had died, I'd asked Trowa only once if he thought we ought to be worried. It seemed like we were awfully connected to not be concerned. I'd nearly asked if he was behind them, but I found I didn't want to know. If it was him it was something awful, something I didn't want to think about a friend having done. We didn't speak of the war and we wouldn't speak of this. He only assured me we were both quite safe and refused to say more.
I couldn't imagine being 'safe' after seeing the crime scene photos from the doctors' room. They hadn't just been killed, they had been maliciously murdered. It was two days before anyone found their bodies and the pictures were splashed across every television news screen on the planet and the colonies. I felt sick looking at them even at such a distance. Quatre had been on the line with me before the first of the broadcasts was finished airing, asking me if I had heard.
I'd asked, "How could he do this?"
"Trowa was with me," was the whisper of a response. "He was here."
It might have been Wu Fei, I'd told myself in the ensuing silence.
I didn't believe it.
The next day I had gone to the crime scene in the middle of the night, when the last of the investigators had given in to exhaustion and finally gone home. I'd let myself into the hotel room and investigated a little more thoroughly. They had left the room fairly intact, a strip of caution tape across the doorway to stop anyone from destroying evidence. Though I searched for as long as I could without being caught, I found nothing that indicated it was anyone I knew. No tags had been left behind, no marks on anything that would have been left by Wu Fei or Trowa or anyone.
The entire rest of my week had been caught up in trying to hunt down the perpetrator, in case they decided to get serious. In case they decided to come for me. In case they came for Mara. I'd spent hours upon hours of coffee on the computer, picking at records and accessing places my computer had no business being. My efforts turned up nothing. At all. The doctors' killer or killers had vanished so thoroughly I felt like a child trying to chase them.
That didn't mean I was surrendering. I knew that there were limits to what my home computer could do. I didn't have the network access at the house that I would have if I gained access to a better mainframe computer. I needed out of the house as soon as possible, to hunt whoever this was that would surely be hunting us. There was no way I would let Duo's sacrifice go to waste. He had wanted us to live and be safe and I was going to do just that.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a sitter - one I could trust leaving Mara with thorugh this - until Friday, when Quatre had time set aside for the faire. He'd come to take Mara until I returned from my hunt for the killer. He glanced over at me even as my thoughts finally circled back to him. Mara was holding out her hand to him, both of them still smiling like cheshires at her wild, semi-choerant stories. "What's the matter?" he asked, expression faltering the tiniest amount.
"Just… thinking," I responded noncommittally. He didn't buy it.
"Stop thinking about it," he said quietly, not quite chiding me. "We'll be fine."
"I know," I told him, forcing my hands to continue the work of packing lunch. The art faire was set in the wide open park under the scorching hot sun and I wish I'd had the foresight the first time to bring food and – more importantly – water. It was the tail end of early summer, which meant it was setting into the hottest part of the year and being jammed in a crowd with so many other faire-goers didn't help anyone to cool down at all.
"Do you know when you'll be back?" he asked, clambering to his feet with Mara trying to cling to his arm.
I shook my head. "You'll know," I said. "You'll see it on TV and then I will be back."
"You don't have to do this, Heero," he assured me, though his tone said he knew better. He knew I would. "I have people out looking."
"They won't find him." I almost laughed. While I knew that Quatre's people were good, were thorough, this person was better. Faster. Vicious. "I'll be fine. Just take care of her, okay?" I held out the knapsack for him.
He gave me a half-frown and the weight of the pack pulled his arm down a little bit as he took it. He opened his mouth to say something more, but the phone began to ring. Taking a step out of the way, he glanced to me curiously. I stared. No one called the land line. Work didn't have my home phone number and none of my very few friends called that line because they knew I never answered. Intent on ignoring it, I turned to begin gathering my own gear for the hunt.
"Aren't you going to answer that?" Quatre asked, swinging the backpack around his shoulder and letting it settle.
"No one important knows the hard line," I replied sullenly, shoving necessities into my own backpack so I could leave. I would have to be much more discreet due to the huge faire going on just outside my front door; the festivities had bled down onto our street.
Quatre made an exasperated noise and moved to the phone. "You're impossible, really."
A pang of regret lanced through my chest as I watched him answer. Duo had been the same way; he could never leave a ringing phone unanswered. On occasion I'd suspected that was how they'd always caught him during the war- left a phone somewhere he would find it and called until he showed himself to answer. He was so… so…
"You're wasting your time," I growled, turning away from him and stuffing another piece of equipment into my bag.
He gave me a dry look. "Hello?" he greeted politely. For a brief second he listened, looking slightly confused, before he held out the phone to me. "It's... for you."
I rolled my eyes and gave an irritated snort as I snatched the phone. "Of course it is. Hello?" I grated. Who else would it be for; no one else lived here anymore.
"Come to the front door. Alone."
The hairs along the back of my neck prickled at the gravelly voice. It was completely static, devoid of emotion. Clearly it was spoken through a voice modification device so as to disguise the caller's identity, but I knew who it was without asking. A shiver raced down my spine and I felt as though I'd been dipped in ice; this was no ordinary phone call. I'd been found. I'd been caught by the person I'd been about to set out to catch.
"Okay," I said calmly, motioning for Quatre to take Mara out the back and silently mouthing 'run' as clearly as possible. He gently picked her up from where she was watching us on the floor, adjusting her to sit on his hip. Though he gave me another confused look, he moved swiftly toward the back of the house. "Who is this?"
"It's been a year since that boy, that kid you tried to save in that video, sacrificed himself for the world, hasn't it?" My muscles tightened with every word until I was ready to snap. "What a shame that was," the voice cooed mockingly.
Something within me broke at the words. "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing right now but I can tell you that if I see you, if I find you, you'll wish I was kind enough to kill you," I hissed into the phone as I unlocked the small drawer on the underside of the phone's cabinet. My gun felt heavy and awkward in my hands as I pulled it from hiding. "There are far worse things in this world than death. I'm one of them."
"That is a pretty big claim to make, sir," the voice said, mocking and amused now even through the modifier. "Have you ever met Death?"
"We were acquainted," I growled, remembering how Duo had joked to me late at night during the war. Three bullets, I noted as I stood. I didn't have time to get more, but three would be plenty. I was a good shot.
"Are you coming outside or shall I step inside to get you?" the voice asked nonchalantly. "You're taking an awfully long time."
"You realize there is an art festival outside my door," I said seriously, laying my hand on the doorknob. I glanced over my shoulder, but Quatre and Mara were nowhere in sight. I hoped I'd given them enough time to get through the fence in the backyard because this was it. If I went down they were next. "You won't get away with anything right now."
"Oh, I don't intend to get away," it said smoothly. "A year ago that boy started covering up tracks that should never have been made. I've been cleaning up the mess those idiots made when they created you. They've been… taken care of properly, along with everyone else involved. You're the last ones; you and that blonde kid you've got in there."
The voice chuckled, a crackling noise that thickened a lump of fear in my stomach; whoever was on my phone was a stone-cold killer. My hands were shaking the tiniest amount. If what this person said was true, if the person on the other end of the phone could be trusted, that meant that they'd murdered the doctors. It mean they'd already gotten Trowa and Wu Fei. It meant that we hadn't heard from them in so long because we wouldn't be hearing from them ever again.
It meant one wrong step and we were next.
"So you see, you're it," the voice continued icily. "You're my last stop. I don't have to get away after this."
I swallowed thickly and drew open the front door slowly, staying as clear of the open doorway as possible. I peeked around the frame and saw a mass of people in the streets. Cart vendors had spread this far down, selling food and water to the people who hadn't had the forethought to bring their own. The stir of people was noisy and brash as everyone spoke gaily amongst themselves and enjoyed the cloudy summer day. The sound echoed back to me on the phone so I knew the person wasn't lying. Whoever it was, they were here. Watching me. I scanned the crowd but there was no one standing still, no one that looked like they might have been making the call.
"Where are you?" I demanded, slipping back around the doorframe so I would be at least a little more protected.
"Did you love him, that boy?" the voice asked suddenly, curiously. Cruelly. "I saw you on the news broadcast. It looked like you did."
"Shut up," I hissed, including a few choice names that only drew more laughter from my caller. "Don't you fucking talk about him. Where are you?"
More laughter. "I'm right outside; don't tell me you didn't see me. I'll be disappointed after coming all this way for you."
I took another look around the edge of the doorframe but all I could see was innocent bystanders. People who had no idea what was going on around them, no idea that there was about to be a murder one way or another, right in front of their eyes. I cursed silently, but I knew the thinning crowd was still too thick.
"Give up?" it asked softly when I didn't respond after a minute. "Is it worth it, to spoil it all so soon? Should I even let you see me yet?"
"If I see you, I will kill you," I snarled under my breath. The crowd was shifting, beginning to clear a little in front of my house and I could see a patch of black that was alone and unmoving.
"You shouldn't make promises you can't keep, Heero," the voice said sadly. I saw him them, standing statue still amongst the writhing mass of people. Slim and pale skinned, he was dressed in black almost like an olden-days bodyguard, complete with sunglasses that wouldn't allow you to see eyes at all. The figure smiled devilishly for a split second, as though to say he knew I didn't have a clear shot, before the crowd swallowed him up again.
I couldn't breathe. I took one faltering step forward and halted, mouth working without my throat. There was no way…
"Duo...?"
The mechanical sound of laughter dropped away and became real and rich and his as he pulled the voice modifier away from his lips. "Acquainted?" he asked amusedly. "I think we were a little more than acquainted, Love."
My heart was lodged too thickly in my throat to respond with more than a choked "How?" It carried through the phone anyway.
"I disabled the lights inside the machine before you got there, so I wouldn't get hurt. Before the tape began recording. The incinerator didn't activate while I was in it."
"The records," I croaked as he reappeared at the edge of the crowd. He stopped there, clinging uncertainly to the distance between us as if he couldn't decide whether to come closer yet. "Those records can't be reworked. They all said it had been activated while you were there…"
He shook his head with a soft smile and his voice filtered through the phone slightly delayed from when his lips moved. "The time on the tape was wrong. I knew I couldn't reset the machine's records quickly or accurately enough to not be discovered. I ran the machine before you got there and then rigged the recorder to sport the wrong time." He shrugged. "They can check it up and down but if you didn't tell them exactly what time we were there, they'd never know better."
"No," I whispered. "No, you were gone when I opened the doors, Duo."
"Well it wouldn't have looked very bright if you'd opened those doors and I'd still been standing there, would it? I left through the exhaust vents and came back once you were gone to toy with the recording system so it's time was right again," he said simply, sadly. "I'm sorry," he whispered and I could hear the lump in his own throat through the words, even over the phone. "I'm sorry it took me so long and I'm sorry I had to hurt you." He was walking through crowd and his glasses were off and his hair was down from the cap and he was alive in front of me as I dropped my phone away from my ear to stare.
Hesitantly he climbed the front steps of my house… of our house and halted, watching me with a smile full of a year's worth of tears. He was nervous, obviously, unable to tell if I was angry or upset or what. I laughed, but the noise caught in my throat as he opened his arms and suddenly we were together again, hugging and whispering and dropping to the ground. I barked my knees roughly against the cement porch as we landed but I barely noticed. He had his hands in my hair and mine in his as questions and reassurances fell between us like rain.
"I am so sorry," he whispered slowly at last as he kissed my shoulder. I buried my nose a little deeper in the crook of his neck, breathing deeply of him. "I'm sorry."
"I know," I said, because I couldn't bring myself to say 'it's okay'. It wasn't. It hadn't been for a whole year now.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, simply relishing the contact and the presence of one other, letting the adrenaline fade from our systems. I could feel his heartbeat beneath my fingertips and I let it reassure me again and again that he was alive and here and that I wasn't dreaming. His breath in my ear, the feel of his hands over my back, his lips to my skin… it was real this time and I didn't want to let him go, even when he pulled back a little and brushed the hair from my face with both hands, resting his forehead against mine.
"We're safe now, Heero. Forever," he said quietly. "I… I caught up with the doctors last week, I'm sure you heard about them."
"Everyone heard," I replied, feeling a little sick. "You did that?"
He shook his head. "No… I wanted to, but I didn't. They did it to themselves. Hired someone else." His eyes dropped away from mine, in guilt he knew he shouldn't feel but couldn't help. "Before they… I talked to them. They… they said they came to our house when all of this started. They sent someone to find us but we were gone. We'd gone to the hospital, do you remember? We just left all that blood, Heero."
Numbness seized where my thoughts should have been just then. "We locked the door. We cleaned it… we…" I trailed off because I realized just then that… we hadn't cleaned it. I hadn't even thought about it when we got home that night or before I left for work the next day. We'd left all that blood there; I'd been too angry to pay attention to what I thought was being left safe in our house.
"They didn't take any. They thought they were too late so they cleaned it up and tried to come up with a secondary plan of action." He chuckled then but it was rife with bitterness. "I guess you guys think alike; their solution was to blow things up, too. They sent Trowa to destroy all hard evidence a few days later, even our hospital records on file here, before they realized we were still alive."
"And once they'd realized it?"
"Remember how we made a run for it in the middle of the night, and we saw those guys go to our house?" he asked, and my stomach twisted uneasily.
"Yeah."
"Docs sent them to pick us up before anyone else could nab us. If we'd stayed that night, we could have avoided everything. Unfortunately I didn't know that until last week."
It was my turn to shake my head. "We could have hidden with them for a while, but… it would never have been safe."
With a small smile, he pulled a tiny vial of clear liquid from his pocket, pried one of my hands free of him, and pressed the container into my palm. "We'll never have to hide, Heero. They took care of the blood we gave them and used it to create an enzyme that neutralizes the viral coding. Eats it, essentially. They were going to use it to spray down our house, so nothing in it could be used, but then they found out we were still alive. They made it viable for our bloodstream. Circulation time is roughly three weeks after injection."
I stared down at the vial in my hand, eyes wide.
"Three weeks," he whispered next to my ear, echoing my thoughts. "Three weeks and we're free." He caught my eyes as soon as I looked up again. Smiling softly, he wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand. There was not anything I could say that could match up to that revelation and so silence fell between us for a moment. "But it can wait for later, he said finally, voice a little stronger. The vial had disappeared from my hand before he spoke; his thievery skills had not dulled. "Where's the squirt?"
I cursed before I could stop myself and almost struggled to my feet. Shit. I'd told Quatre to run with her and they could be anywhere by now. My hands were faster than my feet, snatching up my cell phone from where it lay on the pavement before I could stand. It was ringing before I'd known I dialed.
"Where are you?" I asked before he'd finished saying hello.
"Mmm," he said with a smile in his tone. "We're about twenty feet into the backyard. Are you two going to come to the faire with us now?"
Duo started laughing just as I would have gotten angry. "You knew?" I growled, shoving at Duo who couldn't seem to help himself. "Since when?"
"Only since Tuesday, I swear," he said, laughing now himself. "Trowa knew longer; he told me Duo called him before you even aired that tape."
I glared at Duo. "You called him the day it happened?"
He shrugged helplessly with a smile, shoulders still shaking in mirth. "I had to have a plan! Someone would have figured it out if I didn't have help."
"You could have told me," I said softly and his demeanor changed.
"It had to be real," he explained gently, eyes turning away from mine. "I didn't know… I didn't know if I would be able to do it; kill everyone and come back to you. I didn't know if I'd survive that or if I would want to come back with such stained hands. I wanted to let you and Mara live in peace if I couldn't come back, let you think what everyone else thought. I'm sorry, Heero." He glanced up through his lashes and then down again. "Would it have been any better, knowing?"
My own words to him echoed in my head as he spoke and I leaned forward, closing the phone and setting it down once more as I pulled his chin up to look at me. He did so only reluctantly. "I am sorry, Duo. I am. I should have told you all of it from the beginning. I shouldn't have let it get so bad. It should have been my hands, not yours, taking care of the mess. I wish it had been."
He leaned forward and kissed me tenderly before smiling the slightest bit. "I don't," he whispered. I should have been angry with him, I wanted to be angry with him for not saying anything but relief was so thick in my veins that I couldn't bother with anything else. I felt sick my stomach was so tight. "What are we going to tell her?"
"She isn't old enough to know."
"She will be," he countered softly.
My chest tightened at the thought of having to tell another unsuspecting person. "It's over now," I said thickly. "She never has to know."
"We don't have the right to keep it from her," he soothed, so gently that I nearly believed him. "It's not a question of if we have to," he continued sadly. "It's a question of which truth she hears. Will it be our truth? The truth? Should we tell her that her existence, like ours, once endangered humanity? Should we tell her someone might get the wrong idea about her someday or should we tell her it's okay now? That it's over?"
"Duo…" I said warningly. I could hear footsteps from inside the house now. Quatre was on his way to the front with the little girl in question.
"You can't hide from it forever. You can't let her be another me. She deserves to know her past and you are going to have to decide which story to tell." Quatre joined us with Mara in his arms and Artemis on a leash even as Duo's words rang in the air between us. The dog fell upon Duo and I with a wagging tail and soggy tongue until we were forced apart and to our feet to escape.
"Daddy!" Mara squealed happily, holding out her arms as soon as he was tall enough to take her. He grabbed her up and lifted her into the air before settling her against one hip. He gave me a sheepish smile as he placed Mara back on solid earth and then glanced to Quatre. They exchanged an embrace and a few whispered words of greetings and gratitude before parting.
"So I hear there is an art faire in town," Duo said happily, holding one hand out to me in proposition when the exciting moment had passed. I slipped mine into his, relishing the simple contact as his smile broadened. "It's been a very long time since I've done anything normal."
"Duo," I said very seriously, tugging back on his hand as he began to leave. He turned to look, a shadow of worry crossing his features. "We are not normal people, you know that, right? We never will be. We can't afford to be, not even now."
"I know," he said, eyes dropping to the ground. He nearly pulled his hand from mine but I held tighter this time. I wouldn't let him go again. Never again.
"But Duo," I murmured as I drew him closer. "That's okay. I did 'normal' for a whole year and it was nothing half as special as what we can be."
"You think so?" he asked as Mara took off down the front porch steps. Quatre was moving past us with Artemis, who faithfully followed behind Her Girl with perked ears and a wagging tail. I smiled, swallowing against the tightness that still lingered in my throat at having Duo back so suddenly, and threaded my fingers into his as I watched the others practically romp toward the faire.
I looked to Duo and he smiled back. We had been through so much, seen so many things, killed so many people… Our lives had been uprooted more times than I could count and we had lost those close to us so often, so forcefully it left scars inside and out. We would never be normal people because our pasts did not allow for it. We would always be separate from the rest of the population. When I looked into Duo's eyes what stared back at me would always be our past; it would always be the war and the pain no matter what other joys or happiness was there.
We would always be different, I thought as I stared at him. But that didn't mean we were worse off than anyone normal. It didn't mean we wouldn't have each other. That didn't mean the others wouldn't be there through it, be there to be the same different. It didn't mean we had to be alone.
I stepped over to him, brushing my lips against his, felt the curve of his smile, the pulse of his heart as he pressed back gently. "I know so," I whispered against his lips.
Mara's squeal of delight split through the air but neither of us turned to look. I thought back to what he had asked of me just before she appeared with Quatre. Did I really want to let her go through what Duo had been through with me? There was no way I could avoid hurting her; either I told her too much or too little. I searched Duo's eyes even as I thought it, remembered the look on his face when I told him how much I had kept from him. I remembered the way my own chest tightened knowing that I had lied via omission to the person I loved most in the world; knowing that I had done the one thing that he hated above all else.
He was right. She deserved better than that. He had deserved better than that but the past was made of scars that would never heal. The best I could do now was to make sure no one else was hurt by this.
"I know so. I know we are going to make it, Duo, normal or not," I assured him softly at last. "All of us. And when the time comes, I will tell her everything she wants to know about her inheritance, both name and blood." I took his hand again and he grasped it tightly. "But not today," I said softly. "Today let's just… let it go."
We're safe, I told him silently. It's over now.
We don't have to go back to the battlefield. We don't have to fight or kill or run or hide. We don't have to pretend we're something we're not; we don't have to be soldiers in a war we didn't declare.
We don't have to go back.
It was over, I told myself smiling as the words settled warmly within me, as we set foot inside our new, clean lives for the first time. We'd won. After over twenty years of fighting off everything we didn't want to be and never asked for, twenty years of scars that would never leave us, twenty years of memories that would never heal, we had finally won. We were finally, finally free.
We weren't settled or finished sorting ourselves out. We didn't have a plan or much of a path to follow. I didn't know where we were going to go from here, where we were going to end up or what would happen along the way. I didn't know what other problems would crop up alongside our new life or how we would handle it. I didn't know how far we'd make it on our own. There was a lot I didn't know as I set forth that day.
I did know two things, though, I thought as I watched my daughter play with my friend and my dog, as my fingers twined a little more tightly into those of my lover.
I knew that though we were safe, we weren't 'okay' yet.
But I also knew… we would be.
/End Epilogue, Inheritance/
/End Inheritance/
Notes:
Please see my profile again (it has changed and is worth reading again now).
I just… thank you. To all of those people who stuck this out to the end. To all of those people who trusted me enough to not lynch me when Duo 'died'. To all of those who are reading this story in its entirety for the first time. THANK YOU. I cannot say it enough.
I hope that you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
The last thing I would like to do before I leave you to review is issue a thank you to Saramoon5, without whose help this story would never have been written. Another thank you needs to be issued to Mazmaraz and Keiichi Sei for their beta-reading work throughout this story. Thanks guys; you're awesome in a way words can't properly describe.