Author's Notes: At the end of the chapter.
Be My Downfall
by Kristen Elizabeth
"Duo, please, please, please tell me you remembered to pack her present."
With Hilde staring him down and Jeremiah yanking hard on his braid, Duo couldn't be entirely sure of anything. She ought to have been glad that he hadn't forgotten the car seat or their kid himself. In all fairness though, he'd only done that once. And Jeremiah had been too young to be traumatized by it.
Now their son was a healthy, eighteen month-old hurricane of energy and destruction with the face of a cherub. He hid his devilish nature behind dark brown curls and violet eyes. Did Hilde honestly expect him to keep up with Jeremiah and remember to pack every last thing for their trip to Earth?
"If I say no, how long will I be staying on the couch?"
She pursed her lips. "A good week, Maxwell. I had Jeremiah with me when I was shopping for it; he nearly got me thrown out of three stores. In case you had any doubts, he is so your son."
"Was this present…a set of colored bath crayons?" Duo guessed, vaguely sure he'd seen her wrapping them, and even more vaguely sure that he'd placed the wrapped package between his shirts in their suitcase.
Hilde's shoulders relaxed. "You did remember. Thank you, thank you, thank you." She knocked on the door of the modest one-story house. "It's bad manners not to bring a present to a birthday party."
"Don't know how much of a party this weekend is going to be." He swung Jeremiah to his other side, grimacing as his braid went along with his son. "Don't forget what else happened this time last…"
The door opened just then, revealing Heero Yuy…with a diaper over his shoulder and a cloth bunny in his hand.
"Wow. Heero." Duo coughed to conceal an amused snort. "That's quite a look you're going for. The Perfect Father."
Heero ignored him and held the door open wider. "Come in. Gisele just woke up."
"You look great," Hilde assured him after a quick hug. "Now where is that sweet daughter of yours?" Without waiting for an answer, she entered the house, searching.
Wisely keeping his mouth shut, Duo followed Heero into the living room where Hilde had located Gisele taking sleepy baby steps towards them across the carpeted floor. "Dada!"
Hilde's eyes watered. "Heero, she just keeps getting prettier everytime I see her." She bent down and picked up the little girl. "Hi, baby. Happy first birthday."
Although she was usually good around other adults, Gisele had just woken up and only wanted one person. "Dada," she called again, stretching out her little arms towards Heero.
He gently took her from Hilde and offered her the bunny. "Sorry," he apologized. "She's in a phase."
"Yeah, I remember those." Duo looked down at his own son who was squirming, fairly desperate to be released. "Is it okay if I let him run?" Heero nodded. "Of course. You've probably had every inch of this place babyproofed since the day you moved in."
"The day before," Heero corrected. "I wasn't taking any chances."
"I think Heero just made a joke, babe."
Hilde laughed. "I don't think he was joking."
One look at Heero's blank face confirmed this.
Minutes later, after Heero had changed Gisele and put her down in her playpen, he offered Hilde and Duo drinks. The three adults sat on the couch and watched Gisele play with her toys. Jeremiah sat on the floor a few feet away, scribbling in a coloring book.
Setting his beer aside, Duo picked up a stack of coffee table books. "Boot Camp for New Dads: A Crash Course in Parenting…What to Expect the First Year…Webster's New World Medical Reference Guide…" He shot Heero a look. "Are you one of those parents who thinks the sniffles is whooping cough?" Getting another glare, he continued reading titles. "Motherless Daughters: A Father's Guide…I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Grieving the Sudden Loss of a Loved One."
A moment passed in silence.
"Better than therapy," Heero finally said. "Cheaper, too."
Now that the topic had been broached, Duo set the books down and cleared his throat. "How are you really doing, Heero?"
"There are good days," he replied quietly. "And bad days."
Hilde gripped her glass of soda water with trembling fingers. "Gisele really does look so much like Relena."
"I know." Heero gulped down the last half of his own beer. "Believe me. I know."
"You know there's going to be a memorial ceremony tomorrow," she continued. "Are you going…and taking Gisele?"
He stood up with his empty bottle. "She used to tell me that she didn't want the baby in the public spotlight. I intend to respect her wishes."
"Besides," Duo jumped in. "We're having a party tomorrow. Is Relena's brother coming?"
"He'll be here. Noin, too."
"Are you and him finally getting along?"
Heero emerged from the kitchen after disposing of his beer bottle. "Neither one of us are dead."
Duo looked at his wife. "Now that's gotta be a joke…right?"
As Heero raised an eyebrow, all Hilde could do was laugh.
At precisely noon the next day, the doorbell rang. Because Heero was occupied giving his daughter a bath, and Hilde had given up trying to get Jeremiah to take one, too, and had settled for at least changing his clothes before the party, only Duo was on hand to answer the door.
"Hey!" he greeted the men who stood on the stoop. "Heero didn't tell me you two were coming."
Quatre and Trowa stepped inside; each of them carried a brightly wrapped present. "It was a last minute decision," Quatre told him. "I was supposed to speak at Rel…at the memorial, but I decided I'd rather remember her here." He smiled weakly.
"We didn't want to spend the day with a bunch of politicians who only ever knew what she did, not who she was," Trowa finished for him.
Duo nodded. "Yeah, I hear that. Come on in; I'll get you some drinks."
They had just settled into some mildly awkward small talk when the doorbell rang again. This time, Hilde emerged from the guest room and answered it with Jeremiah seated on her hip.
When his wife led the new arrivals into the living room a moment later, Duo was more than a little surprised to see Wufei and Sally Po enter, hand in hand.
"I had no idea this party was gonna be so big," he exclaimed.
Wufei shot him a withering look. Sally squeezed his hand and replied, "We had no intention of attending that overly dramatic, flowery memorial service. She would have hated it."
"She would have," Heero said entering the living room from the master bedroom. He was bent over at the side in order to hold onto Gisele's little hand as she walked beside him. "Thanks for coming. Everyone."
Sally pressed her fingers against her lips. "My god. She's so big. And so beautiful." Surrounded by so many unfamiliar faces, Gisele clung to her father's jeans. "A little shy, I see."
"If she's got as much of her mother's personality as she does her looks, that'll change," Duo noted. Hilde elbowed him. "Ow! What?"
Silence blanketed the room for a moment. Heero finally cleared his throat. "You know, it's all right to talk about her."
Quatre looked down at his drink. "Really?"
"I want Gisele to grow up knowing her mother. That won't happen if she's never mentioned."
Breaking away from Wufei, Sally approached him. "She'd be so proud."
Jeremiah broke the quiet that followed this. "Hun'ry, Mama. Schiken!"
Rather than wait for the rest of the party, Heero opted for serving the lunch spread he'd ordered from a local deli. To Jeremiah's delight, there were chicken fingers.
To busy himself, Heero fixed up a little plate for his daughter and put her in her highchair to eat it. He sat next to her and watched Gisele eat. It was only some soft vegetables and plain pasta, but before he knew it, she had carrots smeared on her forehead and up into her baby-fine locks. She grinned at him, showing off her incoming teeth.
"I guess it only tastes good if most of it's been rubbed in your hair," he told her, cleaning her face with a napkin. "What am I going to do with you?" Gisele made a grab for his nose and caught it in her tiny little hand. Heero went along with it, pretending that she'd stolen his nose away, much to Gisele's delight.
Hilde nibbled on her sandwich, observing the little scene. It was heartwarming to watch Heero interact with his daughter. He might look like the same man who'd crashed at her apartment on L2 nearly two years ago, and slept with half the blonde prostitutes on the colony, but he definitely wasn't the same guy. Somehow, through all the turmoil, pain, loss and grief, but perhaps more importantly, the love, joy and gift of life, Heero Yuy had rediscovered his heart. And grown into a man who could love and be loved.
The doorbell interrupted her reverie. Duo went to get it and returned with Millardo, his daughter Elissa and a just-pregnant-enough-to-show Noin. "Look who I found," he announced to the group.
Heero stood up, wiping carrots off his hands. "Noin," he greeted Relena's sister-in-law. "Millardo." The latter was significantly less enthusiastic.
"I'm sorry we're late," Millardo said. His voice was slightly hoarse. He reached into his coat's interior pocket and pulled out a small disc. "Has she already opened her gifts?" he paused to ask.
"Not yet." Heero frowned. "Why? What is that?"
Noin answered, the same strange hoarseness in her own voice. "We received it two days ago from Relena's lawyers. They're still in the process of going through her estate…and last week they found this." She took the disc from her husband. "It's Relena. She must have made it and mailed it to herself while you and she were…away all those months."
"You didn't know," Millardo surmised from the vacant look in Heero's eyes.
"No." He swallowed. "What does she say?"
Relena's brother stared at him. "I think you should just watch it. With Gisele."
Although there was no official word from Heero on whether or not everyone was invited to watch Relena's disc, he had no comment when the entire party gathered around the disc player in the living room. It was likely that he had completely forgotten that anyone else was in the house. He sat with Gisele on his lap, one arm wrapped securely around his daughter's little body.
Millardo started the disc playing and stepped off to the side.
When Relena's face appeared on the screen, Heero drew in a ragged breath. There she was, alive and lovely, smiling at what would have been her disc recorder. She sat in a chair in a room that Heero recognized as their bedroom in the cabin he'd taken her to for the final months of her pregnancy. In fact, she was pregnant enough at the time of this recording to have a small, round pooch, which she idly stroked with one hand as she began to speak.
"Hi there," she said, giving a little wave. "Well, by the time you watch this, you'll probably not be a baby anymore, will you? Since I found out I was going to have you, I've felt that you were a girl, but if you're not, I want you to know that it wouldn't matter to me one bit. I would have loved you, whoever you turned out to be. That's why I'm making this. If you are watching this…" Her words wobbled. "…it means that I'm gone. I'm so sorry. I'm not there…and I'll never get to tell you all of this."
Hilde turned her face into Duo's neck to muffle a sudden sob.
On screen, Relena breathed deeply and regained her composure. "But hopefully your daddy is. And if he's there, I hope he'll hug you afterwards and answer any questions you might have. Because I know that he loves you. If he doesn't always show it like you'd expect him to, don't doubt what he feels. For a long time, life was very hard on him and it made him hard right back. But that's not who he is at heart. Way down, in all the places he tries to keep hidden, he's a wonderful man. And I want you to know, I love him. I've probably loved him since I was fifteen years old, but it's only recently that I really fell in love with him as a person, not an ideal." She paused. "And I know now…that he loves me, too. I suppose you could say I was his downfall. But you know what? I don't think he minded falling nearly as much as he let on. That brings me to something that's very hard to say. Your father...he deserves to be happy. If he ever finds another woman who he can love, and if you love her, too...don't let him use me as an excuse not to be happy. Do you understand? If there's one thing I've learned the past couple of months, it's that you have to be happy while you can. Because you never know what will happen tomorrow."
Heero tore his eyes away from the screen for a moment. When he looked back, he saw through a film of hot tears.
"My precious baby, you are the greatest gift I've ever been given. I can't bear the thought of not seeing you grown…not being there when you're all grown up." Relena lifted her hand to her mouth. "But I know my time is limited. And it's running out. Just know that I didn't go willingly. I fought it all the way. The wonderful people in my life…your uncle and aunt…Dr. Po…the Preventers…Duo and Hilde and Quatre…my Heero…they all helped me fight. I wouldn't have lasted this long without them. I hope they're as much a good part of your life as they were in mine."
After a fortifying breath, she went on. "I want so many wonderful things for you, angel. I want you to learn as much as you can about the world around you. I want you to be healthy and happy; I want you to know love in all its wonderful forms. And someday, if you have children of your own, I want you to watch them grow and have children of their own and for those children to have children…" She stopped to wipe her cheeks. "I want you to love living in this world. I haven't always done the same, but now…I'd give any of my titles, my entire fortune, even, to be with you and your father. Please…carry that thought with you, whenever life gets a little bit dark or you're alone and scared. Your mother loves you and she's watching over you. Always."
Relena looked down at her stomach and laughed suddenly. "You just kicked me. I'll take that to mean you think I'm rambling on. And I should end this; your father will return any moment." She blew a kiss. "Hug him for me. If I know Heero at all, he'll need it."
Millardo stopped the recording, freezing Relena's smiling face on the screen.
If anyone was able to speak, they kept quiet in deference to the man who sat rigidly still, twin tearstains down his cheeks the only evidence that he was still alive.
Before Heero could stop her, Gisele wiggled out of his lap and landed on the floor. Everyone watched, but no one stopped her as she toddled her way over to the disc player. Staring up at the screen that dwarfed her little figure, she pointed up with sticky fingers and said a single word for the first time.
"Mama." Gisele looked back at Heero. "Dada…Mama!"
Heero blinked out of his trance and nodded at his daughter. "Good girl. That's mama." He looked back at the screen. "That's my Relena."
The End
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's stuck with this story over all the months it's taken me to write it. I hope this final part was enough of a conclusion. Trust me, it nearly killed me to kill Relena, and I know it struck a chord with a lot of you out there. I'm grateful that you kept reading and reviewing. Thank you again. Take care until next time...because there's always room for a little 1xR.