C&C greatly appreciated.

-CW

=================================================================
                         MELTING POINT
=================================================================

                       by Chris Willmore

    Gundam Wing characters and situations copyright Gainax
            Entertainment.  Used without permission.

=================================================================

This didn't really happen.  But then, that's rather fitting since
this diary doesn't really exist.  Nor do I.  Most of the time.

Quatre died when a lucky shot from an Oz suit caused an explosion
in the Sandrock's cockpit.  It was a slow death by burns,
electrocution and asphyxia.  The other four pilots heard his
final screams over their comm links.  Sometimes he sounded as if
he were trying to speak, but his words were rendered
unintelligible by the background crackle of fire and electrical
arcing.

The body was recovered once the battlefield was cleared, and
found to be surprisingly unmarred.  It was Duo who pointed this
out, rather cheerfully.  Heero looked away from the corpse for
long enough to flash him a hurtful glare.  Wufei's eyes were
focused on another world.  His fists were clenched and his gaze
was one of utter concentration.  Trowa wasn't there.

Oh, he STOOD there.  He cast a shadow and his boots made an
impression on the sand, but for any intent other than that which
could be filled by a doll or a scarecrow, he was absent.  That's
what he does, you see.  He runs away while staying in place.  And
now he was running very far, and very fast, indeed.

In his mind's eye the real-world desert and the wrecks which
littered it faded into a cool blue corridor saturated with a
thick white fog.  At its center was a narrow lane of
glass, and it was along this he fled.  Hurtful things lurked
half-unseen at the sides of the path and closed the way behind
him.  They'd been collected over a lifetime of escape and
preserved here, frozen in an azure mist as thick as dream.  The
horrors tumbled slowly through the frigid goo; with no motion or
volition of their own it was the pressure of new entries that
sent them toppling one over another and onto the glass runway.
What they were, exactly, Trowa did not know.  That was the point:
to remain unaware. He had to keep running.  He was as warm as
they were icy, and if he stayed in any one place for long the
casing round the thing he wished concealed would melt, and they
would have to face each other.  Confrontations hurt, and he would
not be hurt again.  And so he pressed on forward.

He kept running while a convoy of four Gundams caravanned two
corpses, flesh and metal, to a city in the sand.  His body drove
the mobile suit that led the line, so that his eyes saw nothing
but the desert dunes and whirlwinds.  Once among the
Maguanacs his mind turned mourning to a festival.  The most
affected by the death became sword swallowers from which the pool
of blood, the wounds and tears were carefully edited.  Wailing
and tearing of hair were censored from others, turning them
into gesticulating clowns.  Those who could not bear to look
at the prone mobile suit or what it bore on its crossed scimitars
were transformed into lion tamers, whips and chairs placed into
their averting hands by Trowa's mental studio.

The lion that they shied from kept stone-still.

The funeral procession was a parade, the endless line of mourners
merely black-clad mummers dancing to a slow and steady rhythm.
This is how Trowa saw the scene as he glanced at it through the
fog of his glass corridor.  I knew it was not so; I saw the death
and sadness as they were, observed them carefully and tried to
tell him, but he would not listen to me.  He did not have the
time. Evasion took up all of his attention and his sight was
tightly focused on a goal at the horizon's edge, demoting all
other views and senses to peripheries.

Which is not to say he ran for ever.

The open coffin at the ceremony's end tore through the blanket
separating Trowa's inner world from that of others and buried
itself daggerlike before him.  A roadblock. An image that spanned
views of reality, that could not be transmuted, that existed in
all points of view at once and stubbornly refused to disappear.
A young boy in a vest, with skin and hair too singed and
discoloured to pretend that his closed eyes and crossed arms
signalled only sleep.

Trowa stood before the casket both in the glass hall and on the
raised platform in the town's main square.  Quatre's corpse was
cold, much colder than himself.  He fancied he could see the body
thawing from the heat which he exuded, but he could not move.  He
could not think.  To dwell upon the sight before him or to try to
move beyond it would involve recognition, acceptance,
confrontation.  Pain.  The way behind was that of memory, and not
an option.  The past was full of demons frozen in their moment of
creation, and he was not about to wake them.

No way backwards, no way forwards, no way standing still.

I nudged him, tilting his eyes ever so slightly in a particular
direction.  He looked.  And saw.  The past was frightening, the
present bleak, the future desolate, but in the unexpected smile
of a boy's cold, dead remains he saw the warmth of that which
could have been.

No way backwards, no way forwards, no way standing still.
Nowhere to go but sideways.

Pictures that he did not understand superimposed themselves upon
reality.  All smiles and hair and skin, a tangle of blankets and
clothes beside two sets of sliding limbs.  Dreamt images rose
from the pit in which he'd cast them, drawing his hand up and
forwards towards the ashen face that had meant more to him than
he suspected.

The other mourners had long left for sleep or private weeping;
few had noticed and none had dared disturb the brown-haired boy
frozen before the bier.  The night was cool and quiet.  Only a
few faint stars, the moon and four Gundanium sentinels bore
witness as Trowa Barton brushed his fingers lightly across what
had been Quatre's cheek.

Until the corpse's own eyes opened.

That's when we woke up.

The shock of sudden waking dissolved the dream entirely, leaving
only echoes and shockwaves of emotion without an explanation for
their presence.

As I've been writing Trowa has been looking out the window,
carefully clearing his mind in an attempt to rid himself of
feelings both unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

It won't work.  Now that I've set the story down, it'll stay a
part of him.  He won't notice it.  Not directly, and not often.
But it'll be there, influencing him in subtle ways.  And who
knows? Maybe some day, when this mental diary of ours is large
enough, he'll be able to stop running, and rest, and look into it
and learn about himself.

Someday.


                           * * * * *


       Trowa drew the curtain.  The moon was too bright tonight;
it must have disturbed his sleep.  He took a few steps back
towards his cot and paused before the bedroom door.  A moment's
indecision, then a chill as his feet stepped from his room's
carpeted interior to the cold ceramic tiles that lined the
hallway.  Ten steps forward (towards the kitchen), on the left
side.  The door was ajar.  He pushed it fully open, careful to
not make a sound, and stepped in.

       He listened to Quatre breathing while waiting for his
eyes to finish adapting to the dark: in through the mouth, out
through the nose.  The room faded in over ten exhalations.
Quatre's blankets were pulled up to his chin and he held a teddy
bear snugly under one arm.  On the night-table next to him was a
cup of tea, cold and untouched.  A vest and baggy trousers were
draped carelessly over a wooden chair.

       Trowa moved closer.  There was something about the way he
lay that called to him.  The blond hair spread out over his
pillow, the curve of his shoulder, but most of all the slight
upward turn of his lips.  A smile.  He dreamed of something
pleasant, no doubt. Something pink and cuddly and utterly devoid
of guns or tea.

       A slight movement sent a lock of hair across the sleeping
boy's cheek.  Before he could think, Trowa reached down to brush
it away. He caught himself before he touched the skin and froze
in place.  Quatre's eyelids trembled slightly, and Trowa's hand
drew back, still slightly warmed from the other boy's body heat.

       Where an observer would have said at first that Barton's
face showed indecision, now it snapped into its trademark
expressionless mask.  His hands became fists at his sides and he
walked silently back to his room, trying hard not to think about
what he'd been doing, or why.

       But he did look back.

=================================================================
                       END MELTING POINT
=================================================================