Moments of Haven Part 5
de natura deorum heeroisque

Mrs. Callahan caught me off guard earlier today. It was almost the funniest thing when she said it, I had to keep myself from laughing. There was no way she would have understood.

She said she thought I was so normal.

Ha. Me. Normal. Ah, the things she doesn't know. I wouldn't say normal. Well-adjusted, maybe. I have my fair share of neuroses. Alright, more than my fair share. But that doesn't stop me from being a functional member of society. Everyone has their problems. I'm just a little better at hiding them than most people. If I play the fool sometimes, it's simply that I think it's a much more interesting way to pass the time.

Not to say that I'm not the person I pretend I am. Although if I really am that person, I suppose I wouldn't be pretending, huh? But the person I present to the world isn't entirely a fabrication. In general, it's just a person who's me, who's ignoring some things about me for the moment. But I guess I'm not all that messed up, all things considered. At least, not as messed up as I used to be.

A lot of stuff went down during the war, and even before the war, but it does no good to dwell on it. It took me a long time to learn that. We've all made mistakes. We've all done regrettable things. Had regrettable things done to us. But there's nothing a person can do about them now, except maybe deal with the consequences, so we deal with the consequences. That's all. If I seem normal to the casual observer now, that may be because I simply choose not to think about all the bad stuff that's happened to me all the time. That just twists a person into a bitter little angerball.

I was angry for quite a while, after the church incident. Angry, and grieving, and betrayed, and just a little guilty. But amazingly enough, it was Heero that helped me out with that.

It was after the war, and we were all lounging about that school Quatre found for us. I woke up from my restless dreaming in the middle of the night once, and decided I couldn't sleep any longer, so I slid out of bed and sat at the chair at my desk, staring out the window. Of course, you can't really move much in a room when you're sleeping with as hair-trigger a character as Heero, so naturally he woke up and asked me what I was doing. I tried telling him to just go back to sleep, but he said he'd already done that the last three nights this had happened, and he was getting a little tired of it, and what could I say to that?

So he climbed out of bed and sat down at his own desk and didn't say anything or do anything. Just sat there, passing the night with me, watching the moon, as I was. It's funny, now that I think about it, but after I don't know how long, for some reason I found myself answering a question he hadn't even asked, and I told him all about it.

I was being plagued by dreams of the church. It was probably brought on by the approach of Easter. In any case, it was your standard nightmare fare. Fire. Brimstone. Mobile suits. Corpses pointing accusing fingers at me. Drowning in the blood of innocents. That sort of thing. I won't go into it. It would just bore you.

For a guy who's not very emotional, I think Heero understands emotions very well. I guess he would have to, to be able to control them in such an unrepressed fashion, as he does. Weird, I know, but trust me. He does. Anyway, I hadn't mentioned it, but I guess it wasn't too hard to figure out. He deduced that I was feeling guilty and angry about the whole thing, and he was quite right.

Then he interrogated me.

And then he smacked some sense into me.

It worked wonders.

He went through every event of that awful night, and grilled me until I had boiled everything down to the plain facts. Then he went and dissected it, moment by agonizing moment, explaining causes and effects, offering conjectures and suppositions, drawing logical conclusions and supplying objective commentary, and what it all boiled down to was this: I had no reason to feel guilty about it all, and anger would get me nowhere.

That was the sort of revelation from on high that I wanted. If God could make a case as clearly as Heero Yuy could, I'd believe in Him, no qualms at all. But He can't. End of story.

I can't say why I believed Heero. People had told me the same thing before. Hell, even I'd told myself the same thing before, about the guilt, at least. Intellectually, somewhere along the line I realized that it wasn't my fault the church was destroyed. The rebels shouldn't have taken refuge there, and the Federation shouldn't have attacked. But to my rather shocked child's mind, at the time, I easily decided that because I had taken that mobile suit from the Feds, they had destroyed the church. I had been a bad boy, and I received divine punishment as a consequence. But you know what? Even if I had been a good boy, they likely would still have destroyed the church. Wanna know why? Because God probably would have just decided to screw me over anyway. It's like the whole Job thing. Never did like that story.

That's about the only reason I believe that God exists. The world is too damned screwed up for it to have happened without some divine will to guide it.

Shit happens, and sometimes it happens to nice people. A lot of times, it happens to me. Intellectually, I understood the first part of that statement. Emotionally, I believed the second. Maybe I was seeing patterns that weren't officially there; nevertheless, it was hard to escape the fact that very few good things had ever happened to me. But then Heero's quiet conviction came along, with his impassive logic and objective opinion, and somehow it worked. Somehow, things got explained to me in a context that worked for me, and I came to understand that I shouldn't take all the bad shit personally. After all, if I am not worthy of God's love, then surely I am not worthy of His hate.

Heero also managed to dispel my anger as 'counterproductive'. The Federation was gone, the rebels were dead, the war was over. Holding onto anger and hate was pointless. I had opened my mouth to protest at the time, but I stopped myself. Did I really want to go on, holding onto it? Did I want to be consumed by rage and bitterness? Did I have nothing better to do with my life? Why on earth was I trying to protest?

I changed what I was going to say, and converted it into a statement of survivor's guilt. Couldn't have him thinking that he had won, after all. That's something he couldn't argue away, because of two tiny little facts: I'm alive, and they aren't.

He didn't try to argue the point. He gave me a look, a perfectly understanding look, and calmly agreed with me that, yes, there will always be a lingering guilt, and no, it probably wouldn't go away, but consider it a sufficient way in which to commemorate the dead, and deal with it.

Then we went to bed for what was left of the early morning, and when we woke, we never mentioned it again. But I can tell you, I slept better at night afterwards.

Sometimes, it's like he's got all the subtlety and delicacy of Wing's beam cannon. But other times... he can really surprise you. Heh, I suppose Wing's beam cannon can surprise the hell out of you, too, but you know what I mean.

I'd sort of expected that sort of thing out of Quatre, but not Heero. Not that Quatre hadn't tried. He had taken it upon himself to be something of the camp counselor, back when we were all together. But maybe that was why it didn't work. I don't doubt Quatre's intentions, his desire to 'help' me. But his approach, unfortunately, was all wrong. All that 'If you ever need someone to talk to', 'You're not alone', 'You shouldn't keep it all bottled up inside', all that was a recipe for disaster with me.

I'd heard it all before. After the incident. I was kinda out of it for a while, after it happened, and I somehow got picked up by the local authorities, who dumped me with the best excuse for a youth center they could find, now that the church was gone, and there, they tried to counsel me, and console me, and do all that pleasantly artificial support crap of theirs. Now, maybe all that would have worked on a normal kid, but I've never claimed to be normal. Far from it, in fact. I had problems. They got worse. And these 'helpful' people just weren't helping.

I noticed they all said the same things, as if they were all reading from the same script. I noticed they offered to always be there if I needed them, but they wrinkled their noses at me every time I got near. They tried to convince me that everything would be alright, but no one ever explained to me how that might be so, what I could do to make it all right. They said it would get better with time, but no one ever said how long it might take, how long I would have to suffer. They told me to move on, but no one ever told me how, how to move on when every decision you have to make, every breath you take reminds you that they're gone. They claimed they were in a better place now, that God sometimes worked in mysterious ways. Let me tell you something, then. God's a demented little bastard with a very offbeat sense of humor.

Snort. I think I've described Heero like that before.

Emotions like that are a little like God, I think. I'll need a little proof of their goodwill toward me, if you please, before I start having any faith in them. Words are nothing if there are no visible actions to back them up. It's not like their saying these things could somehow make them happen.

It might have been fine if one person had told me that, maybe even two. But everyone, looking at me with the pitying eyes that didn't understand a thing. It didn't take me long to clear out of that place, and return to the cold, hard streets where no one would ever murmur a soothing, lying platitude to me again. No one meant a thing they said. All those words were what society told them they were supposed to say, and now I cringe inside when I hear them. I'm well accustomed to how empty words can be, now. They don't mean anything. Saying 'I'm so sorry' was just an easy out, it kept them from having to summon up any real compassion. Society considered their moral obligation to be nice to be discharged with those three, meaningless little words. What were they sorry for, anyway?

God was supposed to love me, you know. He was supposed to love everyone. They always said so. But none of His actions that I've ever seen have ever hinted that that might be true. Bah, but I can do without His love, if His love will get me killed. I can do without love altogether. Love didn't keep me alive on the streets. Maybe it could have kept me warm at night, but it sure as hell couldn't feed me. If I turn around suddenly to find it in my own backyard, I won't reject it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to go looking for it again. Look where it got me the first time.

I don't want to call Father Maxwell a liar. Misguided, maybe. Innocent, even. He preached with his words, but at least he meant them. He died for them, and the ideals they represented, no less than Heero nearly dying for his ideal. His actions reflected his faith. But while mere words might be heard by the Almighty, they obviously weren't heard by His people.

Preaching hadn't worked to stop the violence. I decided to try something new. I thought maybe a little action would make it all go away, take all the killing and senseless bloodshed away and make everything better, for me and for everyone. He did say, after all, that men had started the war, and so it was up to men to end it. I didn't see anyone else volunteering for the position, so I agreed to partner up with Deathscythe and come to Earth.

Father Maxwell used to tell me that I had potential. That I could make something of myself. I don't know if this was what he had in mind. I think he thought I would become a priest, and go forth and do God's work. I used to ask him 'How?' How could I, a lowly brat that no one wanted, rise from the streets of L2? Father would reply that God would provide.

Well, Someone provided, alright. But I don't think it was his god that did. I think it must have been Shinigami that granted me Deathscythe, that I might go forth and do His work. Just as much a tool as ever I might believe Heero was. Maybe there's a Heiwagami or something out there, and Heero is Her angel, and somehow that wouldn't be contradictory.

Sometimes I wonder if the good doctor J used Heero. Because sometimes, I get really spacy and wonder if Heero used the doctor. I don't mean used, in a manipulative sort of sense. But Heero's just the kind of guy that would always be doing something about something. I wonder if he just saw Dr. J as a way to get the training and skills he felt he needed to continue doing something about the world. (Would that make Dr. J a Heiwagami...? *shudder* More likely Relena.)

I just get the feeling that if he had been picked up by the Darlians instead of Odin, maybe he would be right up there spouting Absolute Pacifism with Relena.

If he had grown up on the streets of L2, no doubt he would have been taking care of all the street kids he could, doing what he needed to do. Maybe he would have been begging, thieving, and even selling whatever of himself he had to in order to make the money to keep everyone warm and fed. And then he would have found some way to get everyone off the streets and clean up the neighborhood, and then the neighborhood next to that, and so on until he'd miraculously turned the whole colony around. I grew up on L2, and normally I'd think that that was just a wild fantasy. But somehow, if it were Heero, I could see it happening.

If he had grown up under the care of a priest, maybe he, too, would have been a priest, taking confessions and gathering people into the fold of peace, advising and blessing people, and generally improving the lives of those both in and outside of his congregation.

If he had grown up the son of a wealthy businessman, he probably would have encouraged charitable enterprise, managed to give nearly everyone a job, gained the respect of all the politicians, and still managed to turn a profit every year. Then maybe he'd have gotten mixed up in politics and maybe he'd be a council member on the ESUN board, making a difference.

If he had been picked up by Ozzies? Maybe he'd have won the war for them instead.

But chance dictated that he meet a crazy old scientist in an alley, right when he needed it, so he ended up a soldier for the colonies.

Heero's just like that. The kind of person you can't help but be changed by. He's changed me, certainly. I think he might be the best thing that ever happened to me. Shinigami must be smiling on me at last. I think I've done enough of His work by now to deserve a nice little pension plan. And maybe this time, I'll be able to hang on to it for a while.

...

I don't know. Do I seem normal to you?

*shrug*

I guess I don't really care what you might think. If you can't take me as I am, neuroses and all, then you can just get out of my way so I can find me someone who can.

OWARI

he's not really talking to anyone, if anyone was wondering. maybe himself.
incidentally, 'heiwa' means peace, so a heiwagami, which i entirely made up, would be a god of peace.
he's a little more frank, or maybe dramatic, with himself than he might be with others, so if anyone is wondering why you don't really see this in his regular Haven personality... as he said, he usually just doesn't dwell on this stuff. you just caught him in a moment of... introspection. i don't think i crossed into angst with this, but that's just me.
does anyone wonder how a neurosis differs from a psychosis? psychoses are marked by a fundamental mental derangement (as schizophrenia) characterized by defective or lost contact with reality, while a neurosis is a mental and emotional disorder that affects only part of the personality, is accompanied by a less distorted perception of reality than in a psychosis, does not result in disturbance of the use of language, and is accompanied by various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances (as visceral symptoms, anxieties, or phobias). let's hear it for www.m-w.com! so let's not be calling heero or duo psychotic anymore, ne?

 

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