cozzybob (cozzybob) wrote in cozzybabbles, @ 2008-02-26 01:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | pagan, pagan for hire, relena |
[GW] Pagan For Hire 7
Pagan For Hire 7
by cozzybob
Pair: Pagan, Relena, Mrs. Darlian.
Warning: Takes place shortly after Heero blows himself up, with spoilers up around until that point. Err. Sorta Mrs.-Darlian-bashing, mentions of Relena with a gun. ;D
Note: Seventh part, was for Pagan month at gw_ozzies, blah blah blah. You know, I know, if you don't, it's okay. Hee! Long overdue... sorry about that. Not very pleased with it, but enough I say! You are craving Pagan. Yus! You don't need to read the others to get this, each is kind of a stand-alone anyway. Just Pagan lookin' after the kiddie pies. Yayz! *kishes Grandpa Pagan for being so wondie*
Summary: After Darlian's death, Relena vanishes, and Pagan struggles to catch up.
"She's a very spirited girl," Mrs. Darlian had said.
Pagan, sitting across from her, sipped his tea to keep from throttling the woman. Mrs. Darlian always seemed a bit of an air head to Pagan--he had never liked her, and he did not know what Darlian ever saw in her. It was known to everyone but her husband that Mrs. Darlian did not love her husband at all anymore. He wondered if she even mourned for his death. She seemed fairly well rested, either way.
"She mentioned something about a boy. A hero?"
"Heero," Pagan grated.
She nodded, overly-large gaudy earrings swinging erratically. "Heero, yes. He must be lucky, to catch her attention. She's such a lovely girl."
And thereby, the conversation seemed to end again. There had been many points of silence, a dismissal where Mrs. Darlian would try to send him off, but Pagan would refuse to move. She seemed to forget that while Pagan might have been employed by Darlian as a butler, he served no one but the heirs of Sanq, and even then it was only by choice.
"Heero Yuy is the code name of the terrorist that pilots the Wing gundam. I need not say that he is intent to kill her, and yet Relena has purposefully driven herself into danger by hunting him down--you call that lovely?"
Her voice, like everything else about her, was light and airy, a cover for her raging apathy. "Relena can look after herself. Did you not see to that, Pagan?"
Oh how he hated her.
"Your daughter--" No, she wasn't Relena's mother. "The princess has become self-destructive and deaf to reason. She will not look after herself, that is the point!"
And there, in the barest shadows of those botox infested eyes, Pagan could see sorrow. Mrs. Darlian looked away to hide cracks of her carefully built mask. "She came here. She came here and she said that she knew that I wasn't her mother. She came here and she told me that she loved me anyway. She came here and she said, Pagan, she said that she was going to kill the woman who murdered her father." Cold smile. "Good for her. I hope that bitch Une falls into the rotten mouth of death."
Pagan stood, but only to sit down again. He stared at her.
Mrs. Darlian looked up again, and when she did, she was hating. "Does that sound like suicide to you?"
"No," Pagan said. It sounded like something her brother would do. Something a Peacecraft would do. And it was well beyond suicide.
She laughed, going back to that airy princess of the pea facade that she was so fond of. She sipped her tea and sat back in her chair, even as her eyes glared with insane bitterness. "But as long as she's okay..."
**
Mrs. Darlian had stopped loving her husband a long time ago. Pagan did not know what came between them, but he knew the only reason the marriage remained was because of Relena, and with her husband dead, Mrs. Darlian had stopped all appearances. She had gone cold and distant. Pagan found it convenient.
He ended up chasing Relena's trail for months after the assassination, and the closest he'd gotten during that time was the party at Marquise Weyridge's estate, where Relena, much to Pagan's own shock, shot the rose off Colonel Une's lapel, and escaped alive. It was a hard thing not to hear about in the media, try as OZ might like to cover it up. A peaceful girl like that, and she had such a deadly aim...
Did you not see to that, Pagan? Mrs. Darlian was no fool, try as she might to wish it that way.
Pagan had arrived the day after, and endured a long conversation with the star-struck Weyridge. The man could not believe that his own granddaughter--adopted or not--had wielded a gun with such mastery, or daring. But it was not the gun that worried Pagan, it was the act in itself. He had instructed her so that she could protect herself, not so she would go out and seek the revenge of her second father's death. A father whom, Pagan hated to admit, had been right in opposing that instruction on the princess in the first place. Of all the men to die in this war, Pagan knew he was going to miss Darlian the most.
But Relena had not slain. Mere millimeters and she might have, but Relena had not. A small prayer of thanks for that, but really, was that mercy or intelligence on her behalf? Both? Her brother wouldn't have missed Une's heart for either, that Pagan knew, and it was one the thing that separated Milliard from Relena at all; by memories Relena would never remember or possibly fathom, Zechs carried no such mercy in his veins. He had no room beyond the hatred... and Pagan was only glad that Relena did not know that life, only glad that at least he had done well enough to teach her better. It had been his choice to pull them apart, and he would live with that until his dying breath.
But it didn't matter. Pagan hadn't caught up with her until just after the incident in New Edwards, where Colonel Une threatened to destroy an entire colony holding millions upon millions of people in return for the capture of the five gundams. In answer, Heero Yuy self-destructed Wing with himself still inside, and he watched on the screen, awed as his tiny broken body flew from the explosion like a pin off the end of a grenade. Relena had watched him do it too, and in some ways, it was her first real taste at what war could do. Watch, pretty girl, as your school-girl crush is crushed. This is what they never taught you in private school.
It had not made her happy.
Especially when she finally caught sight of Pagan again, only hours later.
**
There are very few who have ever known the darker side to Relena's personality, which does indeed exist, like any other man or woman who lives and breathes in or around the Earth. Some of it had been seen at Weyridge's party, and some later throughout her actions regarding the pure dismissal of a brother she never knew, who had, in essence, done nothing but lived and died for her... but out of all the people who have ever claimed to know her, it was rare that they really knew anything beyond celebrity; that of the charismatic little girl leading the world into a peace she hardly even understood, her words sugar, spice and everything nice, except during the times when it was not. Out of all the Peacecrafts, she was most talented at hiding the nature of her thoughts--she had been raised as a girl with a father of great importance in politics, and had learned at a very early age to school her expressions and appearences at will to what she wanted to project. She had the rare gift of easily manipulating a crowd to her will--she could make them love her, hate her, die for her, and very few would be none the wiser. Pagan knew because he had been a victim from that terrible day after the fire and onward. It was because of her and no one else that he had committed the rest of his life to their welfare, regardless of rings and fires and bullets and dead Kings... he could've left them to die, free of his troublesome duty, and no one would ever know. But Relena had asked Pagan to protect her brother. She told him to stay. She might have been two, but even then, he couldn't deny her. That was just the way Relena was, is, and always has been.
So it was unreasonable to say that Relena did not carry the same flaws of her brother--the anger, the repeated mistakes, the darkness, even the bloodshed. She had simply projected them differently, vented in ways that were both elegant and terribly awkward. One could say that words did for Relena what a gun had done for Zechs.
Except for the rare times when a fist was much easier.
When Pagan finally met with Relena, she hit him. It was the only time she'd ever hit him in her entire life, and her eyes declared she wanted to do so much more, if only she had the foolishness to carry through with them. Pagan stood in the doorway and nursed his jaw while the others stared, challenging in his ancient, once-dangerous way. Relena, eyes brimmed to the full with raging death, quietly stated, "I would like to be alone, now."
Everyone left, but Pagan. The door shut, and he put his hands to his sides, waiting. Relena sat down in a chair, and stared right back at him. Daring him to speak until the rage was papable between them.
But finally, however, she did break. She was scarcely fifteen, and Pagan had not taught her everything that he knew.
"You lied to me," she said. "You lied to me about everything."
He lifted a brow.
The rage grew, but there was sorrow and confusion and frustration and horror. The atrocities of what it was she'd gotten herself into were written in whispers across her face. A tiny body, tumbling from the explosion that burst underneath his feet.
"Heero is dead," she said, in a long wretched wail, that drew out and grated the further she spoke of it. "I saw him die, I saw him, I watched him--I can't believe he--and you--you lied."
Still, Pagan said or did nothing. This was the way. She would speak, and she would thrash, and she would forget. She could not hide from Pagan, try as either might to let her.
"You never told me. Father--my father?--he never told me about this, any of this. What did you think, that I'd never find out? My entire life, my life, Pagan, my friends--no, no, I don't have any friends. But my life, it's all been a lie. How could you do that? How could you do that to me? Why couldn't you just... why couldn't you just tell me?"
Now her hands were on her face and there was ocean water in her eyes and she was crying and he was guilty and Pagan hated, and hated, and hated, and couldn't say anything at all. Not because he was tongue-tied, but the timing was wrong. The timing was all wrong, it should've happened smoother. Hadn't Darlian said he'd tell her the truth when she turned sixteen?
But they were off by one year, and she was far too young to know any better.
"Those stories, about the princess, and the Kingdom, and the fires..." Bitter laughter. "My life's become a fairy tale. Isn't that grand?"
Pagan approached her. She stared up at him, accusing, and he slapped her soundly across the face.
She held her hand to her cheek, and carefully wiped the tears away.
"Clean yourself up," he said, very quietly. So many things into the words--I did what I did for you, and You could've gotten yourself killed, and A princess should not carry on this way, and I did not help raise you to watch you fall apart over matters that have long since been inevitable.
She sneered right back, arrogant in the way she'd never been before. It was only a cover for her terror, but it was reason enough to want to slap her again. When he turned his back to her in disgust, she demanded, "Where are you going?"
"We're going home."
"We?"
"We."
His tone brought the fighting to an end. Relena stood up, went to the window, sighed miserably. "I watched him die," she said, shock slowly wearing away to sorrow.
"Are you sure?"
She turned.
He did not know what made him say what he said next, but he said it anyway. "Are you sure you watched him die?"
"I saw him fall."
"You saw him fall," Pagan said simply. Relena stared, and he stared back with meaning. "You did not see him die."
"Another lie--"
"It's an observation, Miss Relena, and nothing more. I believe I told you to clean yourself up. Pack whatever you have; we are going home."
"And what are we going to do when we get there? Pretend nothing ever happened?"
Far too late for that, cheeky little princess. "No," he said, firm in his resolve now that there was no turning back. War was war was war, and if children were fighting, then so was he. "I'm going to tell you about the Peacecrafts, explain why I did what I did, and settle down in a nice hot bath with a steaming cup of Rosemary Tea."
And she was far too young to understand. "And then?"
Shoot myself in the foot. "And then we're going to find your boy. I'm afraid I'm stuck with you, dear."
She gave him a half-smile, but it was so bright, it nearly blinded him. A girlish giggle, she went to his side, gingerly touched his face. Guilty. "I'm sorry I... hit you, Pagan."
"It's okay, Miss Relena. Do it again, and there won't be a rose to shoot off your lapel."
"So you heard about that...?"
"Have I ever..."
--Fini