Goodbye LJ...

[windandwater]

This is just to make it official for those who don't know, but I'm leaving LJ completely. For the rest of this week at least. Tomorrow is the Bar Exam and it runs for three days, so don't expect to see me about at all until Thursday night. Or even until the weekend since I plan on spending Thursday after the Bar drunk and crying. No online time for me at all. *whines* It will be hard, but I know I can do it.

So, because I'm a total h0r like that, I am declaring this to be a spam post. Go ahead. Run wild! Give me fics, give me links, give me pics, just babble to your heart's content and rape my inbox so I have something to see when I finally DO come back to the wonderful world of LJ. I don't even care if you write me a drabble and post it one word at a time. XD;

Though, I've tried to make a spam post before and it failed a bit miserably, so I don't have very high expectations this time around. Feel free to prove me wrong though!

♥

Comments

Worthless

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Worthless


Warnings: Refined angst, passing reference to shojo ai, sympathetic Relena.
Rating: PG 13 (for being kind of depressing).
Disclaimer: I do not own Relena Peacecraft, not that she’s in such high demand anyway. She belongs to whoever it is that owns the rights to Gundam Wing; ditto for all the other people mentioned here by name. Leave me alone, I’m a penniless student who’s going to be a penniless professor after I go into debt earning my degrees.


“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
--Kris Kristofferson



The last time Relena Peacecraft saw Heero Yuy off her doorstep, she said (affectionately) “Well, Heero, come back and kill me sometime, won’t you?” Heero smiled and even almost laughed at the joke, and then Relena had to smile herself to see that. Heero didn’t realize that she wasn’t joking.

Relena Peacecraft was very tired of doing what she did for her living, which was leading the world through the tricky mechanics of peace (much the way a scout leader leads her troop on a creek hike. It certainly wasn’t an easy job, and she always had to make sure that, metaphorically speaking, no one slipped on the wet rocks and broke a wrist, or started fights by splashing water at their neighbors).

Relena found that doing her job properly required all of her time and left her no chance for rest or relaxation. She became stressed and drank too much coffee. She never had enough time to sleep or eat properly, she found herself losing touch with all of her friends, except the persistent few who continued to write even if she only sent one letter for their ten and never, ever called or visited.

Re: Worthless

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

She had a daily ritual that included asprin and poignancy and utterly failed to relax her. The pillbox had been a gift from her sometime-ago girlfriend, a belated birthday present sent by courier. Hilde, whom she had come to regard during the course of their brief and passionate love affair as an island of sanity, had dumped her barely a month into the relationship because Relena was never around and didn’t pay enough attention to her. Relena felt quite horrible about that.

Relena wished she could take some time off, or perhaps hand over some of her responsibilities to someone else. Every time she tried, though, another crisis would appear, and she would find herself rushing off to put out another fire. She began to envy her overworked secretaries, who were able to trade shifts and got paid extra for overtime. She began to wonder, irrationally (as those who do not get enough REM sleep often do), if there was not in fact some supernatural connection between threats to world peace and her attempts to take a vacation. She developed the superstitious belief that the only way the strong economy could sustain itself was if she threw herself full tilt into her work and gave ever more speeches, presided over ever more meetings with powerful people, and read and signed the exponentially increasing masses of papers her office gave her.

At night, before turning off the light and curling up alone under her electric blankets for a few hours of sleep, she would recite a mantra of rationalization. “There is the matter of appearance,” she would say. “There is an image which must be maintained. Political stability alone is not enough; the people must also feel the stability. I am a focal point for the perception of peace, and it is therefore vital that I remain visible to reassure the people.” She would then run through the long list of responsibilities to which she had to attend the next day, and drift off into her short and precious hours of sleep.

Relena Peacecraft was slowly going insane, or at least she felt as if she were. She didn’t think the human mind and body were really meant to bear such pressures for very long, and she’d been doing it for two years, ad infinitum. She looked ahead at her future and saw a lifetime of perfect makeup, meetings, speeches, balls, and policy draft. It made her want to scream. But screaming would disrupt her soothing aura of calm maturity and strength, so she swallowed the urge and tried not to think about the future. “One day at a time, Miss Relena,” her kindly butler told her once. She smiled serenely and tried not to think about strangling him.

Re: Worthless

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

She wanted to stop being Relena Peacecraft. She began to have daydreams of quitting her job as an influential government minister and running away to L2 to work at Hilde Schbeiker and Duo Maxwell’s salvage yard. She really couldn’t, though; war would probably break out and she’d just have to go back to fix it, and it would all be her fault. Wasn’t it Duo who said “With great power comes great responsibility”? She had a confused recollection of asking him if she could quote it in her next speech. She still didn’t know why he’d fallen off his chair laughing, although she remembered it fondly.

She wished for a government coup, so she’d be deposed and exiled. Of course, any revolutionary worth his salt would likely have her discreetly executed, rightfully anticipating that exile would just give her a chance to rile the populace against him. And of course, she’d have to rile the populace; as a charismatic and idealistic leader of people, she’d feel obliged. She began wishing someone would just successfully assassinate her, so she could get out of the business without feeling any guilt. Then she felt guilty for wishing she’d be assassinated, because her death would trigger chaos and social unrest, and she wouldn’t be around to fix things.

Relena envisioned, with some despair, a long and successful career at promoting peace and happiness for the entire known world. “It’s good to be the queen,” she said bitterly as she sat at her desk, sorting the endless papers into piles of done and undone, and then laughed without mirth until she cried, and cried until felt like throwing up. She moved with the poise of practice to her clean pink bathroom to be sick, and when she was done, she stared at her red eyes and blotchy cheeks in the mirror and tasted the traces of vomit in her mouth. She thought, I’m going to be remembered forever.

She was eighteen years old. She felt like God. And she wanted someone to shoot her in the head.

The next day, her old friend, the ex-soldier Heero Yuy dropped by for a visit. She found Heero inspiring in more ways than one--his devotion to his duty, his dedication to the ideology of peace to which she herself had converted him, and his ability to adapt, whatever his situation. Heero’s last mission as a soldier had been to end an attempted coup by a military faction that had kidnapped her. He had since, freed of his short and violent responsibilities in the blossoming era of peace, begun wandering the wide green world in search of his soul.

Re: Worthless

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

They chatted over tea in two stolen hours when she should have been in a meeting with the Prime Minister. Heero spoke of fields, forests, nightclubs, cafes, theaters and windswept shorelines long abandoned by human feet. With the gracious face and manner come from a life spent in etiquette and diplomacy, Relena did not weep in front of Heero, but instead congratulated him on his self-discoveries and his contentment. Surely her envy of a man who had suffered as long and greatly as Heero Yuy was inappropriate; a true friend should take only pleasure in his newfound happiness.

She saw him off at the door, kissing him quickly on the cheek, and savoring a flash of gratitude when her friend did not flinch from her touch. “Heero, come back and kill me, won’t you?” she said to him. Heero only smiled, and she smiled back, letting it be only a joke and not an aching cry. After all, with power came responsibility; her work was valuable and necessary, and as long as she was capable of doing it, it would continue on. On and on and on.

How she wished her life were worthless.




et finis.