3nanashi | (no subject)

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He's cold.

He's in A-- He's in a place he should know. He almost does. There's ice everywhere, stretching to every horizon.

It's not featureless, of course. This is a real place, and landscapes don't work that way. It curves in wind-sculpted eddies, looms in knife-edged crumbling cliffs, plunges into black crevasses. The exposed bones of the ice cap are blue-green in sunlight. From everywhere comes the slow groan of glacial motion straining against itself, the buried creaking of sea under ice.

It's supposed to be all right if you're in a mobile suit. He thought it would be sufficient -- the insulation, the armor. Even in a dream he could quote you detailed figures. But in a dream, the figures are somehow insufficient. The wind's cutting through, and all he has is Trowa Barton's (isn't that his own?) old jumpsuit. He's shivering.

If he could remember the way back, that would be fine. But he can't. He didn't prepare right -- he did something wrong, he didn't do enough, he can't remember, and without that he can't move. Every step could take him onto a snow-covered crevasse, and Heavyarms would break right through the crust. He can't move. He can't remember which way to go.

He should be able to remember. But he can't.

The cross around his neck is ticking. It'll blow up soon, and take all of them with it, and he can't afford that, he won't do it, but he can't figure out the way back. He can't disarm it, and he can't get back, and he can't think. It's too cold.

There's snow heaped past his knees. He needs to go.

At least everyone went away. He didn't trap anyone else here, but he needs to do this, he needs to remember what he needs to do, he needs to--

Trowa's awake, like a stick snapping. No immediate threats -- wall to his back, gun within reach, lying down, no one in the room but someone at the door--

Quatre.

His bunkmate. Expected. Okay.

Trowa's awake. Fully, and not just the half-understood instincts that pull him from sleep into battle-assessment. His heart is beating fast, but he can keep his breathing slow and normal. He's awake, in his room on Peacemillion, and the blankets have slipped off him and the clock is ticking softly, and Quatre's at the door.

(His dream has shattered into fragments, disconnected and ungraspable, and the lingering adrenaline of something formless.)

He breathes out, and meets Quatre's eyes.

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Quatre was working on Sandrock when he realized he should go back to check on Trowa; thankfully, the pilot quarters are fairly close to the storage bay.

He's cleaned off his hands with a towel, first, but when he opens the door carefully after a quiet tap to let Trowa know he's there (though, as of yet, Trowa's never not woken due to his footsteps alone) he's unrolling his second sleeve.

"Hi," he says, and he tries to say it casually but there's an undertone of concern he's not even bothering to hide.

Trowa pushes himself up to a sitting position. He's awake; there's no reason the movement shouldn't be matter-of-fact and smooth, so it is. (Because he trusts Quatre, down somewhere below conscious decisions, but there's only so much Trowa ever relaxes.)

"Quatre."

His hands are cold.

He must have shifted the blanket off somehow. He should go back to sleep -- rest is important for a soldier's function, and there's almost a voice attached to those words in his head -- or get up and put on a heavier shirt. Once he decides which.

"How's Sandrock?"

Quatre sits down on his bed, and starts to take off the heavier shoes he was wearing to work on Sandrock.

"Good," he says, amiably. "The right thruster is working at max cap, again."

He's just been fiddling around as one can always do on a Gundam, if you need a reason. The other pilots and he regularly need reasons. It helps you think. Or not think, as the case regularly is.

"Do you want something hot?"

That is: tea, or coffee. Hot cocoa isn't stocked in the kitchen.

Trowa considers that.

The answer is yes. But he takes a moment to weigh the situation anyway. There are always factors.

(It's useless to chase what he can't remember in mental circles. Useless, and inefficient, and impossible to stop.)

It's late. And it'll be a little while before he can easily go to sleep again. He's too on edge from the dream, whatever it was -- which is inefficient, unwanted, and true.

"Sure," is what he says, after a moment.

It's hard, with Trowa like this. He's so uncertain, and uneasy, no matter how calm he can keep his voice these days.

Quatre keeps his eyes down on his shoes, as he finishes untying the second one, and tries not to let how he feels show.

"All right," he says, casual, pushing the second shoe beneath the bed and pulling out his loafers, slipping them on. He stands and moves out of the way, to wait for Trowa.

Trowa sleeps in clothes; many people do, in space where cargo is strictly limited, and as soldiers who need to be ready to move. (He doesn't ask himself how he knows this.) He'll change to a clean set in the morning, but it's not morning yet.

It's never technically morning, on a ship in space, but the start of the next shift is enough to count.

He fishes socks out of his shoes, and slips both on. He's quick, and silent.

He retrieves his gun, tucking it reassuringly at the small of his back, and a sweater while he's at it. It's the only one he has, warm and comfortable and a little overlarge; Cathy bought it at a thrift store that first week.

(If only he could remember what happened before that--

Circles again.)

Quatre holds the door open after him; it's polite, but mostly it's a habit. After scanning the hallway (another habit; he doesn't expect an invasion here, and all he has is the gun at the small of his back, but it's not a habit that's safe to shake) he follows Trowa down the hall to the kitchen.

It's a smaller one, used by members of the Peacemillion's crew. The larger one is more central, and less accessible for making tea.

Monitoring the hall -- what he can see, and everything beyond sightlines too -- is second nature. He doesn't know when he picked up that habit, or why; it feels as if he's always had it, but that doesn't explain the relentlessly civilian Catherine.

He doesn't mind Quatre at his back. Or any of the Gundam pilots, to be honest. (Other people he would let be at his back, but privately he minds.) He monitors anyway.

The kitchen is empty. As expected.

(Trowa's relaxation is infinitesimal even to himself.)

Quatre relaxes a bit more than Trowa does, but his body language still reads as more on edge than Trowa's; even amnesiac, the other pilot has a certain skill at repressing tension in the face of war that Quatre's still learning.

Quatre opens a drawer and rummages through the options. As could be expected on a ship --even one as large as the Peacemillion--they aren't particularly varied; there's black tea, coffee, and a few bags of green tea that they'll need to restock from the main supply sometime soon. He glances up at Trowa "Do you have a preference between black and green?"

Probably not, but it never hurts to ask. And he doesn't have a preference.

He wishes he was more talkative today; that he could chase away the bad dream with some story from his childhood. But it's been rough, today, and it's hard to put himself in the right mood. Still, he tries to keep his tone and his body language amiable and open.

"Either's fine."

Trowa doesn't care.

(There's a certain very subconscious comfort level in not caring about something not because he's decided not to, but because he genuinely has no preference.)

Making tea doesn't require two people. Instead of being in the way to no purpose, he takes a seat at the big table.

The lights are bright in this room. Like most spaceship lighting, they match the spectrum of atmosphere-filtered sunlight as closely as possible. It's a change after the dim bunk. Not good or bad; just a change.

After a brief hesitation, Quatre chooses the green due to respective caffiene content. He'll probably be the one who ends up restocking it.

It doesn't make too long to make tea, but while it's brewing Quatre sets his arms on the countertop. "How have you been?"

It's vague on purpose; Trowa has a bad track record of answering vague questions, but it's better than forcing him into a conversational corner.

"Okay."

Well. It's true.

"Nothing new's turned up," he adds, which is kind of unnecessary to say. If any of them found anything new of relevance to the Gundam operation, they'd share the information as warranted. And the war is pretty much all any of them are focusing on, which is as it should be.

But -- Quatre's very clearly trying.

(He doesn't need to. But if Trowa ever said that, Quatre would take it as a rebuff, instead of what Trowa feels, which is more like I don't understand why you care so much, why you spend so much time hurting.)

"Sounds exciting," Quatre says, somewhat self-deprecatingly but with a quick grin.

Life has tended recently to be either long expanses of nothing, or short bursts of far too much excitation for his tastes. But Rashid has assured him that that is nothing new, in war.

"If you don't have anything lined up tomorrow, we could use you for repairs."

"Sure."

It's better to be useful. And repair work is -- satisfying, in its way.

As long as Trowa doesn't think too hard about how he knows what he knows, but he usually manages okay.

Quatre's smiles, sincere. An extra pair of skilled hands in care of a trustworthy heart is never unwanted.

He moves to rummage for the mugs, which make slight clink noises as they move against each other.

He's quiet as he pours the tea and sets the teapot down; he pauses to fix his left cufflink before moving the mugs to the table, setting Trowa's in front of him lightly.

"Thanks."

It's unnecessary to say. But Quatre's clearly awkward and uncertain and trying, under the social amiability.

Trowa's never sure how to help that -- at least, not the part that's clearly caused by his presence and the amnesia he still hasn't managed to break through. It comforts Quatre sometimes to find chatter, at least. And Trowa doesn't mind listening.

He wraps his hands around the mug's smooth warmth. The grassy-smelling steam drifts up in lazy tendrils. Even in the living areas like this, a spaceship's artificial gravity is lower than on a colony or Earth.

"Don't," Quatre says, voice tight. "Please."

Trowa's silent.

He should know these undercurrents, or at least know which parts he knows and which he needs to piece together, if he could just remember. He can't. There's knowledge hovering at the edge of his thoughts, just out of reach, and it never comes nearer; frustration does nothing.

The tea's too hot to drink for a minute yet.

"I--" Quatre hesitates, and falls silent. There's another moment before he sits down, but he's still staring into his mug. "It's--this is-- my fault. You shouldn't--don't thank me."

Trowa glances at him, through the straight fall of his hair.

He's listening; he's unsure.

It's information. More than that, it's information about what Quatre and Heero have been talking awkwardly around and Duo and Wufei don't seem to know, and maybe he'll remember something from it. You never know.

But he's not condemning. He wouldn't anyway, on just that sentence, but -- well. Trowa's only known Quatre a few weeks that he can remember, but already it's very obvious that Quatre's good at guilt.

Quatre swallows, hard.

He glances out of the side of his eye, to catch Trowa's expression. When they make eye contact he holds it for a long moment, before glancing ahead.

"Colonists killed my father. It... I made a mistake. I thought--" he breathes out, shakily. "I finished building a new Gundam with -- some blueprints that had been left. It had an AI that I -- didn't understand. I didn't care, I -- wasn't rational," he says, quietly. "I was just... angry. And... it seemed like the right thing to do."

He's silent for several long moments.

"You tried to stop me. And you did, I mean -- it worked. But your suit -- I just wanted Heero to--" he cuts off and doesn't say kill me so he'd go save you, because he doesn't think Trowa needs to know that. It puts the situation in the wrong light. He wasn't a sympathetic party. "But we were stopped before we could, of course."

It's almost --

There's something --

There's the tantalizing feeling that he should remember something he can't quite grasp, words and shapes and a cold enormity, but he can't make it coalesce.

(And Quatre's hunched misery is visible in every line of his body.)

"I don't remember," he says, after a long silent moment.

It's matter-of-fact. Not an accusation; just a quiet statement.

(It feels like an admission of failure.)

"I know," Quatre says, quietly.

"I'd understand," he says, after a moment, glancing back over to him, "if you'd want me to leave you alone. I could switch with Heero."

He tries to keep his tone light, and fails miserably.

Trowa's surprise isn't really visible; it shows only in the moment of stillness, and he was sitting still anyway. Trowa doesn't believe in unnecessary motion.

"No."

"You're rational now," he says, because it's true. He's seen no signs of anything else. "It's okay."

Quatre's eyes widen slightly.

"Okay." He smiles, small and hesitant, glancing back into his tea. After another moment, he finally takes a sip.

Quatre hasn't relaxed at all, smile or not.

Trowa sips his tea carefully. It's good, and almost too hot; warmth spreads down his throat when he swallows.

He's not sure if he wants to ask for more information or not. He wants to know, but he wants to really know what happened, and not just chase the trail of someone else's words in endless circles. But right now those words are all he can find.

Quatre doesn't know what to say. What can you say, after that?

So he doesn't say anything at all.

Trowa's not good at empty words. Presumably he never has been.

So he has another swallow of the tea Quatre made, and sits in what Quatre sometimes finds comforting silence. Not always, but Trowa doesn't really know how to achieve comfort except as a side effect, for himself or anyone else.

After a minute, "Were we all working together?"

At the time, he means. As a general question, it seems to depend on who you ask and how precisely you phrase it.

"When?"

Uh.

At any time worth mentioning?

"Before then."

"We'd been allies for a few months," Quatre says, after a moment. "But it depended on circumstances, whether or not we were fighting together. You and Heero were together, then; I was with my family. I'd been injured, and one of my sisters found me and--took me to my father. Once I was healed."

Trowa nods, accepting that.

The information gives him more context. Nothing that jogs a memory loose, not enough to matter, but -- it's context.

For this event, for their course through the war, for the complicated geography of relationships aboard this ship.

Quatre lets out a shaky breath. "You were pretending to work for OZ," he explains. "I don't know how you convinced them, but they'd taken Deathscythe--Duo's Gundam--captive, and it involved destroying it."

He's quiet for a moment. "Heero doesn't know if they knew you were a Gundam pilot. He says Une liked you, but -- that's it."

Trowa nods.

It might be useful to know how much OZ knows about him -- you never know -- but, well. (The part about convincing OZ doesn't surprise him. Maybe it should, since he doesn't remember any of it, but it feels right and logical. People are easy to convince of things.)

This explains a couple of Duo's reactions, though.

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