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

Re: Torn epi

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

He smiled slightly. "I have a house on the beachside," he told me, although of course I knew that before I came. "It has a wonderful view."

"But you live there alone," I said, softly protesting. "Don't you get..."

"Lonely?" he finished for me. "No. I want to be alone. I'm content to spend my time there, and do nothing. Now that the war is finally over... I can do all those things I promised I would do, back when we were fighting. Back when those promises were the only thing that kept me going. Promises I made to myself... and to him."

He finished the sentence in an almost reverent whisper, and my breath caught. "We're worried about you, Hee... Duo," I corrected myself. "Trowa, Wufei... even Zechs. They don't think it's healthy for you to live all by yourself. They want you to come visit. Especially Relena," I finished as an afterthought, almost apologetically.

He looked up, and his eyes caught mine. "She doesn't know where I am, does she?" he asked, a note of quiet alarm in his voice. I hastened to shake my head.

"I didn't tell anyone that I found you... I just wanted to make certain you're doing all right."

"All right," he repeated to himself, almost as if the words were too funny to understand on the first hearing. "Am I all right. Well, Quatre, you don't need to worry about me. I am doing all right."

"Alone?" I challenged. He only smiled, and though he looked at me, I could read nothing from him.

"I have everything that I need," he said softly. "Other things... would just be a distraction. With all of you, you and Trowa and Wufei, we finished the war. I think I can take some time to be alone with my thoughts... my memories."

"For how long?" I had to ask.

Something indefinable moved behind his eyes, and I felt suddenly uneasy. "For the rest of my life," he replied, quiet but unyielding.

Alarmed, I half-rose from my seat and reached out one hand towards him. "You can't mean --"

The tea arrived then, and cut me off; the waitress' presence was an uncomfortable barrier between us, and she hurried to clear her tray and vanish again.

Re: Torn epi

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

I slid back into my seat as the girl left, and stared across the table. He smiled that strange lopsided smile again, and half-shrugged. "You jumped to conclusions," he reproached. "Don't worry about me, Quatre. I'm all right. I have no intention of doing anything... rash. The world is at peace, now, but that might not last forever." He opened one hand in a helpless gesture. "As long as the world might need me... I wouldn't take that away from them."

I hemmed and hawed for a bit, knowing the question I needed to ask, desperately not wanting to ask it. He waited out my polite babble, with a patience grown from countless hours of exposure to meaningless conversation, before I finally worked up the courage to blurt out, "Listen. About Duo -- I need to say --"

"No. You listen." His voice still had the old force of command, and I immediately shut up. His hands curled around the mug, thick and fragrant steam rising from the dark surface of the liquid. It shone as a white and gold mist in the sunlight. "What do you suppose happens to us when we die, Quatre? Not just to our shells, but to us? Do we just vanish into space, do you think?"

I was silent for a moment, wondering what he was up to, before finally answering, "I don't think I know, Heero. But... it doesn't seem impossible... that there should be something left. Souls, I guess you could call it. Some sort of psychic phenomenon of a spirit that could exist without a physical body..."

"Let's suppose that's true," he said. "Let's suppose that when the body dies, the soul is left without an anchor. So it drifts. Without anything solid to hold onto it, without any way to sense or interact with the physical world, the spirit would be totally disoriented. They might have memories of their life, but no way of sorting through them, or of telling real memories apart from creations of the imagination. The closest analogy would be a perpetual dreaming state, constantly rerunning unfocused memories and daydreams around without any sort of conscious control. Eventually, as time went on without any kind of solid input, the spirit would move farther and farther away from the real world."

His voice was strangely detached, and the very weirdness of the scene kept me silent, waiting to see what this meant to him. He took a sip of his tea, before continuing, still in that clinical tone. "The tone of this dreaming state might be influenced by the kind of memories the spirit retained, and by the circumstances surrounding their death. Whether they died at peace with themselves and their loved ones, or not. What more does Hell need to be, than to be forced eternally to relive your worst memories, embroidered on by everything your subconscious can come up with?"

I shivered, despite the warmth of the sunlight. The blue eyes closed, and his voice dropped. "Now tell me what Heaven is. Do you need a God, to give you peace, and give you haven? Do you need anything except for someone else to love you? Imagine, then, if you were a spirit floating free, and you could find the one you love. If you could spend the dream with them, always."

Re: Torn epi

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

He opened his hands, and the sunlight poured down into them, around him, over him. "Imagine the moment after you've made love, that tiny instant when you can touch your lover's soul, when you can't tell where you end and the other begins. Imagine feeling that, not only for an instant, but for always. Always loved... always touching... always together. If you could stay that way, truly forever. If nothing could ever come between you, if nothing could ever hurt you. Never afraid. Never alone. Together. Forever."

He fell silent.



For endless minutes, we sat suspended in the golden moment. When I, too, closed my eyes, I could almost see the paradise he described. I felt as though I could almost reach out my hand and touch it. Like a cloud passing over the sun, a momentary pang of loneliness shivered through my heart, shattering the fragile reverie. Trowa...

Suddenly, I wanted very badly to go home. It was guilt more than anything that had brought me out here, I realized now. Heero had once told me, at the very brink of the self-created Hell that he had just described, that he wasn't certain he could forgive me for being so in love. For having Trowa, when the man he loved was dead. A shadow wavered and vanished in the sunlight, that I hadn't even realized was lying over my soul. It wasn't for Heero, or for Duo, that I had come out here today. It was for the guilt that I could never quite lay to rest.

I opened my eyes. The sacred moment was passed, and the young man sitting across the table from me was only that, now. I smiled at him, as best I could, and stirred my voice to break the silence. "Maybe, some day, you'll find out," I suggested as gently as I could.

He only nodded seriously, as he pushed back his chair and stood from the table. "Maybe someday you will too," he said, and walked past me. I remained seated for a moment, momentarily too shaken to get up.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as if a cold draft; that was the only warning I had before hands gripped my shoulders, and someone leaned down to speak confidentially in my ear. Strands of brown hair brushed across my face, as an old, familiar voice whispered to me -- a voice I hadn't heard in years, except in my dreams. "But until then, we should just enjoy living, ne, Catch? After all -- 'if you love something, set it free; if it still comes back, then it was meant to be...' "

Something violet flashed at the very border of my peripheral vision, and then the presence was gone. I sat frozen, stunned into immobility for a full minute before scrabbling out of my seat and wrenching my body around.

"Duo?" I croaked; I couldn't seem to make my voice work more thoroughly than that. "But you're --"

Duo walked away.