Summary: You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers.
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but the story is.
Title: Blood Brothers, part 2/2
Warnings: Language, blood, vomit, slight spoilers if you need to be warned about that kind of thing.
Pairings: 1+4 (friendship only).
~-~-~-~-~-~-
The flash of light as the last of the Libra battleship disintegrated was almost beautiful, in spite of the act of destruction. Millions of particles scintillated white, gold, green, and blue as they hit the Earth's atmosphere and burned away to nothing. It was as if an enormous firework had been set off to signal the end of it all.
Victory.
Quatre didn't need to hear the word to know that it was true; the very air was resonating with it. Victory. He smiled in spite of his pain. "Victory." He said the word out loud and decided he liked the sound of it.
"Is it worth it?" Asked a cool voice over his com link.
Quatre thought about it as he shut down his cockpit systems and unbuckled his safety harness. The Earth would eventually heal itself. The colonies and their resource satellites could be rebuilt. The soldiers could be absorbed into normal society. All of that could be reversed...but nothing could bring back the lives of the nearly 100,000 people who had been killed over the past year. "No, Trowa, I guess it's not worth it," he said grimly. "But at least it's over now."
"For the time being," Trowa said.
Quatre snorted. "Now you're beginning to sound like Dorothy."
"She made sense, in a twisted sort of way. It seems to be part of human nature to fight each other." The voice over the com link sounded dull and flat.
"Trowa, you're going to make yourself crazy if you keep thinking like that. Just let it go." Unthinkingly, Quatre reached up with his left hand to open Sandrock's hatch release and felt fresh blood flow down his side as he wound re-opened. He cursed softly.
"Are you all right?" Trowa's voice sounded alarmed.
"Yeah, I--" He closed his eyes tightly and tried to will the dizziness and nausea away. The smell of blood was beginning to get to him. He took a step forward and nearly gagged as the blood pooled in the feet of his flight suit made a sickening squishing sound. "I think I need a hand here."
He stood still, eyes closed, and waited until he felt Trowa's arm around his waist before opening them. "Christ, Quatre, you're white as a ghost. Why didn't you come back here after we got out of the control room?"
"_Somebody_ had to watch your back after you ran out of ammunition," Quatre said testily. He winced as Trowa's arm tightened around him, and their feet left the magnetized hatch of the Gundam. They drifted slowly and silently to the floor of the hangar. Quatre closed his eyes again when the nausea threatened to overwhelm him; it just wouldn't do to throw up on one of his best friends, and especially not in null gravity where cleanup would be a nightmare.
"Well, it didn't need to be somebody who just had a fencing foil through the spleen. You have all the self-preservation instincts of a clinically depressed lemming, you know that, don't you?" Trowa sounded annoyed, which made the blond smile. An annoyed Trowa was better than a morose Trowa.
"What's going on here?" Demanded a hard voice from somewhere to their left. Quatre risked opening his eyes and took in a sweaty shock of dark brown hair, a pair of intense blue eyes, and a mouth that was set in a thin, hard line.
"Hi, Heero. Nice shot."
Heero ignored the flippant greeting. "You're hurt."
"That Catalonia bitch went crazy and ran him through with her foil," Trowa explained in a harsh tone. "I thought I'd gotten the bleeding under control, but it must have opened up when we were destroying the Libra."
Quatre blinked a few times; his vision was starting to go dark grey around the edges. "No, it opened up while I was shutting down Sandrock. It was my fault." The greyness of his vision changed abruptly to black. "Could one of you take me to Sally? I feel really, really..." He never did get to finish the sentence; the cold blackness swallowed everything up and he slumped bonelessly between his two comrades as his body finally succumbed to his wound.
~-~-~-~-~-~
There was the sound of snoring, which was odd. Quatre was pretty sure that he didn't snore, especially not when he was awake. He cracked open one eye and briefly took in the dull white walls of the sickroom before he found the source of the snoring. "Heero?"
The boy in the chair snapped awake instantly and put one hand to the small of his back-reaching for a gun, presumably. "What is it?"
Quatre opened his mouth to ask one of the many questions that were floating around inside his head, nagging him, but the nest of snakes that suddenly materialized in his belly changed his mind. So instead of asking where the others were and how they were doing, he said, "I'm going to throw up."
Unfazed, the dark-haired boy merely got up from his hard metal chair and went to a supply cabinet in the corner of the room. He took a white plastic bag from one of the drawers and kicked himself over to where Quatre lay, cold sweat now beading up on his brow, and offered it to him. "It's the anesthetic that's making you sick," Heero explained as Quatre heaved up everything he'd eaten in the past week. "They had to operate. The foil nicked your small intestine a little, but there won't be any permanent damage. You were extremely lucky."
"Lucky?" Quatre said flatly between heaves. "Yeah, I feel really lucky."
A corner of Heero's mouth turned up in a bitter smile. "A little higher, and the wound would have punctured a lung. A few inches lower, and you'd spend the rest of your life hauling around a colostomy bag. I'd say you were lucky."
"Well, since you put it that way..." Quatre spit one last time into the white plastic bag and sealed the top. He tried to pitch it toward the red biohazard receptacle near the supply cabinet, but something tugged at his arm, restraining him. "What the-"
"It's your IV line," Heero explained, taking the offending bag away and dealing with it himself. "You _did_ lose a lot of blood."
Blinking through the lingering anesthetic haze, Quatre looked at the needle in his arm, then up at the bag of blood hanging on a rack over his bed. "It's yours, isn't it?"
Heero inclined his head slightly. "I thought I'd repay your favor from earlier."
"So," Quatre said with a smile as a thought struck him, "we've gone from being brothers in arms to brothers in blood."
"Brothers..." The dark-haired boy said the word slowly, testing the word out. His brow furrowed a bit as he got used to the idea. "Yes, I suppose we're brothers now, in a sense."
"You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers. Anyway..." Quatre winced as he shifted into a slightly less uncomfortable position. "I'm honored to have the soul of outer space as a brother."
"That's the second time you've called me that, Quatre," Heero said, raising an eyebrow. "What do you mean by it?"
"It's a little hard to explain, and you'll probably think I'm crazy." The blond licked his dry lips and paused to find the right words. "It's an intuition I have about you. I believe that when you took the name Heero Yuy, you didn't take _only_ the name, you accepted the spirit of the man who used to lead the Colonies. That spirit is the soul of outer space, and I believe that it has the power to help unite the Colonies and the Earth."
Heero stood silent for a moment, but then he shook his head and smiled a little. "You believe some pretty weird things, Quatre."
The blond grinned back. "Maybe I do, but my intuitions are rarely wrong. And besides, haven't stranger things than that happened lately?"
They had. There was no denying the fact. "We do live in interesting times." Heero admitted. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. "So, if I have taken on the soul of outer space, then I'm meant to see to it that peace is preserved?"
"Yes," Quatre said around a yawn. Although the anesthetic was beginning to fade, he was getting very sleepy. "I mean, we all do, of course, but I have the feeling that you have much more to give than you think."
Heero took a deep, quiet breath. "I don't know about that, and I can't say that I really believe in your intuitions, but I'll tell you one thing: I've been fighting for this peace for as long as I can remember, and I'll be damned if I let anything get in the way of it now."
The blond smiled crookedly. "Spoken like a true brother. I always suspected you were a pacifict at heart." Although his tone was joking, his words were sincere. He thought he saw some of the glacial coldness melt from Heero's dark blue eyes.
"You may be right about that." Heero said thoughtfully. "Time will tell, I suppose. Speaking of time," he said, glancing up at the clock over the door, "I'd better let you get some sleep. Good night, brother in arms, in blood, and in soul. I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of work ahead of us." Heero kicked himself toward the door and let himself out.
~~~THE BEGINNING~~~
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but the story is.
Title: Blood Brothers, part 2/2
Warnings: Language, blood, vomit, slight spoilers if you need to be warned about that kind of thing.
Pairings: 1+4 (friendship only).
~-~-~-~-~-~-
The flash of light as the last of the Libra battleship disintegrated was almost beautiful, in spite of the act of destruction. Millions of particles scintillated white, gold, green, and blue as they hit the Earth's atmosphere and burned away to nothing. It was as if an enormous firework had been set off to signal the end of it all.
Victory.
Quatre didn't need to hear the word to know that it was true; the very air was resonating with it. Victory. He smiled in spite of his pain. "Victory." He said the word out loud and decided he liked the sound of it.
"Is it worth it?" Asked a cool voice over his com link.
Quatre thought about it as he shut down his cockpit systems and unbuckled his safety harness. The Earth would eventually heal itself. The colonies and their resource satellites could be rebuilt. The soldiers could be absorbed into normal society. All of that could be reversed...but nothing could bring back the lives of the nearly 100,000 people who had been killed over the past year. "No, Trowa, I guess it's not worth it," he said grimly. "But at least it's over now."
"For the time being," Trowa said.
Quatre snorted. "Now you're beginning to sound like Dorothy."
"She made sense, in a twisted sort of way. It seems to be part of human nature to fight each other." The voice over the com link sounded dull and flat.
"Trowa, you're going to make yourself crazy if you keep thinking like that. Just let it go." Unthinkingly, Quatre reached up with his left hand to open Sandrock's hatch release and felt fresh blood flow down his side as he wound re-opened. He cursed softly.
"Are you all right?" Trowa's voice sounded alarmed.
"Yeah, I--" He closed his eyes tightly and tried to will the dizziness and nausea away. The smell of blood was beginning to get to him. He took a step forward and nearly gagged as the blood pooled in the feet of his flight suit made a sickening squishing sound. "I think I need a hand here."
He stood still, eyes closed, and waited until he felt Trowa's arm around his waist before opening them. "Christ, Quatre, you're white as a ghost. Why didn't you come back here after we got out of the control room?"
"_Somebody_ had to watch your back after you ran out of ammunition," Quatre said testily. He winced as Trowa's arm tightened around him, and their feet left the magnetized hatch of the Gundam. They drifted slowly and silently to the floor of the hangar. Quatre closed his eyes again when the nausea threatened to overwhelm him; it just wouldn't do to throw up on one of his best friends, and especially not in null gravity where cleanup would be a nightmare.
"Well, it didn't need to be somebody who just had a fencing foil through the spleen. You have all the self-preservation instincts of a clinically depressed lemming, you know that, don't you?" Trowa sounded annoyed, which made the blond smile. An annoyed Trowa was better than a morose Trowa.
"What's going on here?" Demanded a hard voice from somewhere to their left. Quatre risked opening his eyes and took in a sweaty shock of dark brown hair, a pair of intense blue eyes, and a mouth that was set in a thin, hard line.
"Hi, Heero. Nice shot."
Heero ignored the flippant greeting. "You're hurt."
"That Catalonia bitch went crazy and ran him through with her foil," Trowa explained in a harsh tone. "I thought I'd gotten the bleeding under control, but it must have opened up when we were destroying the Libra."
Quatre blinked a few times; his vision was starting to go dark grey around the edges. "No, it opened up while I was shutting down Sandrock. It was my fault." The greyness of his vision changed abruptly to black. "Could one of you take me to Sally? I feel really, really..." He never did get to finish the sentence; the cold blackness swallowed everything up and he slumped bonelessly between his two comrades as his body finally succumbed to his wound.
~-~-~-~-~-~
There was the sound of snoring, which was odd. Quatre was pretty sure that he didn't snore, especially not when he was awake. He cracked open one eye and briefly took in the dull white walls of the sickroom before he found the source of the snoring. "Heero?"
The boy in the chair snapped awake instantly and put one hand to the small of his back-reaching for a gun, presumably. "What is it?"
Quatre opened his mouth to ask one of the many questions that were floating around inside his head, nagging him, but the nest of snakes that suddenly materialized in his belly changed his mind. So instead of asking where the others were and how they were doing, he said, "I'm going to throw up."
Unfazed, the dark-haired boy merely got up from his hard metal chair and went to a supply cabinet in the corner of the room. He took a white plastic bag from one of the drawers and kicked himself over to where Quatre lay, cold sweat now beading up on his brow, and offered it to him. "It's the anesthetic that's making you sick," Heero explained as Quatre heaved up everything he'd eaten in the past week. "They had to operate. The foil nicked your small intestine a little, but there won't be any permanent damage. You were extremely lucky."
"Lucky?" Quatre said flatly between heaves. "Yeah, I feel really lucky."
A corner of Heero's mouth turned up in a bitter smile. "A little higher, and the wound would have punctured a lung. A few inches lower, and you'd spend the rest of your life hauling around a colostomy bag. I'd say you were lucky."
"Well, since you put it that way..." Quatre spit one last time into the white plastic bag and sealed the top. He tried to pitch it toward the red biohazard receptacle near the supply cabinet, but something tugged at his arm, restraining him. "What the-"
"It's your IV line," Heero explained, taking the offending bag away and dealing with it himself. "You _did_ lose a lot of blood."
Blinking through the lingering anesthetic haze, Quatre looked at the needle in his arm, then up at the bag of blood hanging on a rack over his bed. "It's yours, isn't it?"
Heero inclined his head slightly. "I thought I'd repay your favor from earlier."
"So," Quatre said with a smile as a thought struck him, "we've gone from being brothers in arms to brothers in blood."
"Brothers..." The dark-haired boy said the word slowly, testing the word out. His brow furrowed a bit as he got used to the idea. "Yes, I suppose we're brothers now, in a sense."
"You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers. Anyway..." Quatre winced as he shifted into a slightly less uncomfortable position. "I'm honored to have the soul of outer space as a brother."
"That's the second time you've called me that, Quatre," Heero said, raising an eyebrow. "What do you mean by it?"
"It's a little hard to explain, and you'll probably think I'm crazy." The blond licked his dry lips and paused to find the right words. "It's an intuition I have about you. I believe that when you took the name Heero Yuy, you didn't take _only_ the name, you accepted the spirit of the man who used to lead the Colonies. That spirit is the soul of outer space, and I believe that it has the power to help unite the Colonies and the Earth."
Heero stood silent for a moment, but then he shook his head and smiled a little. "You believe some pretty weird things, Quatre."
The blond grinned back. "Maybe I do, but my intuitions are rarely wrong. And besides, haven't stranger things than that happened lately?"
They had. There was no denying the fact. "We do live in interesting times." Heero admitted. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. "So, if I have taken on the soul of outer space, then I'm meant to see to it that peace is preserved?"
"Yes," Quatre said around a yawn. Although the anesthetic was beginning to fade, he was getting very sleepy. "I mean, we all do, of course, but I have the feeling that you have much more to give than you think."
Heero took a deep, quiet breath. "I don't know about that, and I can't say that I really believe in your intuitions, but I'll tell you one thing: I've been fighting for this peace for as long as I can remember, and I'll be damned if I let anything get in the way of it now."
The blond smiled crookedly. "Spoken like a true brother. I always suspected you were a pacifict at heart." Although his tone was joking, his words were sincere. He thought he saw some of the glacial coldness melt from Heero's dark blue eyes.
"You may be right about that." Heero said thoughtfully. "Time will tell, I suppose. Speaking of time," he said, glancing up at the clock over the door, "I'd better let you get some sleep. Good night, brother in arms, in blood, and in soul. I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of work ahead of us." Heero kicked himself toward the door and let himself out.
~~~THE BEGINNING~~~