Author: Crivassan
Genre: romance
Pairings: 2+5
Rating: PG
Series: Gundam Wing
Status: complete
Warnings: not really sappy, yaoi, romance, Duo POV
**Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing and I do not have any money, so don't you dare sue me. If you can really stand there and say that you think I could possibly own Gundam Wing then either you are a great liar (where were you when Nixon needed you??) or you are more delusional than I am, my friend. And that is a feat...I mean, here I am calling you my friend when I don't even know who on earth you are...that's pretty delusional, dontcha think? Anywho...so the point is, no I don't own Gundam Wing. Let's not get into how much I wish I did...that could be longer than the fic itself. **

I Watch Him As He Sleeps + (Duo)

I watch him as he sleeps, brushing a lock of raven silk from his cheek and watching him smile gently in reaction. Even in sleep, he knows how to make me melt. Simplicity is the name of the game to win my heart, and he has it down to an art. I laugh. I'm a poet when I think about him, and I'm awfully sappy about us, but, surprisingly, he doesn't care.

During the wars, when I'd tried flirting or being open about our sometimes-sexual relationship, he'd closed off and snorted. It didn't hurt me then, but it did piss me off. We were friends, and lovers, and yet he wouldn't let me hold his hand or kiss him in public, even when Tro and Q-bean were practically making out across the dining room table. I realize now that he never does things he doesn't mean. While I refuse to lie in words, he refuses to lie in action. And he didn't want to act like we were in love when he knew that we weren't.

And we weren't. Not then. We couldn't be. There were too many walls and barriers between us at that point, each of us putting so much into maintaining our masks, we never would have had enough to give each other. The ending of the wars changed that.

When we decided to move in together at the end of the second eve war, it had absolutely nothing to do with falling in love or wanting 'something more'. I don't think either of us were thinking anything along those lines.

Neither of us was really ever very romantic. We don't take long walks in the park or promise each other the moon and the stars. And while people think that I'm psychotic and melodramatic, when it comes to things that actually matter to me, I think all the false mush sort of defeats the purpose.

So we began our foray into 'being together' as housemates and fuck-buddies, maintaining the roles we'd played through the war. And after a couple months of peace, we started letting our masks go. It was a conscious decision for both of us.

The first thing both of us did when that happened... was get glasses. Funny, isn't it? We'd been so caught up in being big, strong Gundam pilots, we'd put those awful little plastic things in our eyes everyday to keep up the image. A lean, mean fighting machine does not have less than perfect anything, including vision.

And after that, we opened our eyes a different way. It became a sort of game, for both of us I think, but I bet Wufei didn't think of it that way. We searched for changes in each other, tried to mark where the old mask was and where the revealed person behind it came through.

Some of the things I saw were things I'd guessed at before. When left to his own devices, Wufei actually does prefer to read quietly somewhere. However, after I'd learned to read Chinese fluently (I'd been pretty good before, but Wufei helped me refine my literacy while we made my new labels), I found that his 'ancient Chinese texts that were not to be touched' were actually Chinese romance novels and fantasy books wrapped in old-looking paper. Don't get me wrong, he does read philosophy and history books a lot, but he's a lot more open-minded than he lets on.

When he's irritated about one thing, he gets edgy about everything.

When he's proud of something he does, he quietly leaves it somewhere for me to find and then humbly hides it away. Then I have to go find it again. He wrote a letter to me in Chinese calligraphy once and actually tried to put it away somewhere out of sight after I'd seen it. I had it framed. It still makes him blush to see it hanging on our wall.

He knows my moods like the back of his hand and he makes a point to spend at least an hour talking to me everyday. It's his way of making sure we stay open with each other, because I know he wants us to last. And I love that.

And like I said, it's all about simplicity with Fei. The letter I mentioned he wrote was probably the most 'romantic' thing he's done. He doesn't bring me flowers and chocolates wrapped in little packages, or send me little notes every day.

He does, however, make sure that there's always a fresh supply of oranges in the fruit basket; that we never run out of chocolate milk; and that the coffee cup I've been gesticulating with for half an hour while we talk is emptied and filled again with warm coffee before I have a chance to drink it. 

I watch him as he sleeps. It's the least I can do in these small hours when there's barely an hour before the alarm calls us both back into the outside world again. It's nice to know, though, that we can always come back home. To each other.

FIN

[Wufei] [back to Singles a - k]