#turns out she was from australia and being VERY homesick she was delighted by the opportunity to talk about it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rachelisnotatwork · 5 years

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Sweltering round the Fatherland

I did not leave Berlin willingly. In fact I complained constantly throughout the one final brunch I demanded. And on our way to the car rental place. And most of the drive down to Dresden. After nearly 5 weeks in our glorious Airbnb I felt like we probably had at least some light squatters’ rights.

It didn’t help that our apartment in Dresden was in what I’m sure an estate agent would describe as an “up and coming” area, i.e. a bit of a shit hole. It also managed, no matter what we did, to be hotter than the outside world and our host- clearly dubious about the continence of the guests, had covered the bed with extremely noisy plastic undersheets that heated the bedroom to essentially the equivalent of sleeping in a Finnish sauna. That plus a disappointing evening meal did nothing to discourage my belief that leaving Berlin was a mistake.

We had two days in Dresden and it’s surrounds. Because some of the museums are closed on Monday, we decided to use our Monday to go visit “Saxon Switzerland”. The name Saxon Switzerland sets the bar high and naturally it then disappoints because it’s more hilly than Alp-y. I would blame an over-zealous tourist board committee but apparently it was some homesick 18th century Swiss artists.

First off we visited a place called the Bastei bridge, which is a bridge built between giant rock formations. It is pretty beautiful although I feel someone without crushing vertigo could probably appreciate it more, especially since the top was also frequented by a man with an extremely badly behaved Alsatian, thus combining my fear of heights and dogs in one terrifying location.

Our next stop was more pleasant. We walked through the woods and then took a boat ride along the Obere Schleuse, which is a shallow river in a gorge between Germany and the Czech Republic. The boat was gondoliered by a guy who gave a little tour as he punted us slowly down the river. He had what I strongly suspect was a very thick local accent but Marcel thought there might be a chance he’d had a stroke. Either way it was fairly impenetrable to me, expect bizarrely a few minutes where he talked about lichen growth. So I guess that month at language school was really worth it?

The only downside of the trip was that the walk to the boat had been entirely down into the gorge and thus the walk home was entirely uphill. It was fairly steep and exhausting, and what wasn’t particularly reassuring was to find a gravestone half way up one of the steep climbs with a gravestone from the 19th century with a very specific time of death for a forester from something called a “Blutschlage” (literal translation: blood blow). So I guess I should be pleased we got out with just a few insect bites.

The next day we’d booked onto an English-language tour of Dresden. Almost everyone else was north of 75, which made us feel super young. And had also reached the complaining years. The ticket could be torn off to leave a free postcard of Dresden. One Australian woman then complained to the guide that it didn’t include a stamp and wouldn’t let it go.

The tour was pretty good though. The centre of Dresden is stunning as was mostly built by August the Strong, who really liked to party. My favourite fact from the tour was that he’d weigh guests before and after parties and those who hadn’t gained enough weight weren’t invited again because they were clearly no fun. He built a huge complex called the Zwinger for summer parties in addition to a huge palace for one of his mistresses (he had a lot) so he didn’t have to go far for the night.

The downside of touring Dresden is the crushing guilt you get to feel if you are British (or American) for brutally firebombing it. They have pretty much completed the reconstructions now but when you look at the before photos… well, it was no big surprise that both groups were some of the biggest contributors to the fund to rebuild the cathedral (the blacker stones are the only original ones).

After the tour finished we went up the cathedral for the view.

Then we went into the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon. This is largely a collection of clocks and super creepy automatons from the 18th century, so right up my street. Afterwards we had coffee and cake on a cafe on the roof and I went on what felt like an epic trip in the boiling sun to find a toilet somewhere I could use (doesn’t seem to be a legal requirement for cafes to have one here) and ended up begging a cleaning lady to use a museum one. Think Marcel thought I was pretty much dead by then, I was gone so long.

The next day we headed up North. Whilst our final destination was the island of Ruegen, we had a planned stop for the day at a place called Godnasee. This is a lake in the middle of nowhere, where we had a delightful afternoon swimming, sunbathing and reading. The nice thing about East Germany is it is full of lakes and is rapidly depopulating, so it is very easy to find an empty swimming spot.

We got to Ruegen in the evening, just in time for a quick walk before dinner. There were two national parks we wanted to visit in our two days and because the weather was due to be better at the one further away, we went to the Nationalpark Vorpommersche Boddenlandschaft the next day. The spot we picked to go to was a lighthouse on a beach that was a 5km walk/cycle ride/horse and carriage ride away from the nearest car park. We decided to walk because of my lack of cycling aptitude and because legs are a lot cheaper than horse-drawn carriages (thanks to the endless slow tragedy of UK politics, the Euro to pound ratio could be best described as...sub-optimal for us).

This turned out to be a mistake. Apparently Marcel had showered in mosquito pheromones that morning or something so after a few minutes he was besieged by such a huge crowd of them that, whilst he was the main attraction, some of them by dint of sheer numbers bumped into me. This lead to less of a “walk” through the woods than a mad charge frantically waving our arms until we eventually reached the lighthouse. The beach there is quite pretty and in typical fashion, once you walk a short distance from the lighthouse, quite empty.

We took a route back through some wetlands to stay in the sunshine and hopefully avoid the mosquito plague- a successful plan. It also brought us across a cafe that served the only accommodation in the park (a caravan park) so stopped to eat the traditional hot sunny day beach food of...struedel.

On our way back we stopped in the city of Stralsund. It is a pretty little city that used to be a Hansa city (so lots of nice brick architecture), spent a long time being part of Sweden and is now the political seat of Angela Merkel. We had a nice wander around and came across a Simson pharmacy, so I felt quite at home.

The next day we headed out to explore Ruegen itself. Our first stop was a wander along the chalk cliffs there. Sort of surprised we found them and that they were decently high as driving around the island it had seemed as flat as a pancake.

The previous day I had been messaging my friend Karo and mentioned I felt like I was the only British person for about a hundred miles and she directed me towards a place called Woody’s Little Britain, which is a British “emporium” featuring scones and cream tea in the middle of nowhere. Naturally we went. It was pretty boiling, which felt pretty unBritish and the cream was whipped not clotted (Debrett’s would be horrified) but the scones were pretty good.

Afterwards we headed to the beach. Ruegen has some huge long beaches, so we parked up and wandered through the woods to about 10km of pretty empty beach. Marcel went for a swim. I declined because the ocean was full of seaweed and also after Australia, I’m pretty convinced the sea is out to murder me. So I remained on the beach, which in the fashion of East German beaches was full of naked people and noted with amusement that the extremely elderly naked woman sitting a few metres down from us had cracked out a pair of binoculars to look down the beach. I initially just thought she was a shameless pervert, but apparently she was looking to see if her elderly nude swimming companion was coming down the beach (or at least I assumed that was what she was doing, because he did eventually turn up. We didn’t cover the vocab for that in language school).

The following day we headed West. Our first stop was the town of Wismar. Or more precisely a cafe within because we’d left without breakfast and then got stuck in traffic so were both hungry, overly-hot and grumpy on arrival. We then wandered around the town. It is again, a pretty Hansa city, although this one we bombed a bit. We went up a rebuilt cathedral, which I did point out to Marcel that thanks to our bombing could be reconstructed with a lift right up to the tower in (you’re welcome guys!). It is still a port city which apparently brings logs from everywhere to turn into sawdust, or so the giant piles of logs and delicious smell of sawdust that wafts through the town suggests.

After that we went to Schwerin, which is also lovely and historic. It also has a famous castle which looks a bit gauche if you ask me, but Marcel just says looks German.

We had a late lunch and then accidentally discovered some weird mooning monument with no explanation. A rather lengthily googling seems to suggest it is a scene from the life of the founder of this town, who got mooned by the folk of his home town when returning home for a visit because he’d directed all the trade that used to go to their town to Schwerin. I would have thought this was the kind of thing that merited a plaque as far lesser things have generated one, but apparently not.

We ended up having a subpar dinner in town and disappointed, both of us developed a craving for ice cream. This is apparently not something you can get in Schwerin after 9pm so we ended up driving to an out of town McDonald’s for late-night McFlurry’s and then I got all indignant that the lids weren’t hedgehog-friendly like we have in the UK, confirming to all the national stereotypes of weird British eccentrics who are overly sentimental about animals.

The following day we weren’t due in Luebeck, our next stop, until the evening and beautiful weather was forecast. So Marcel found us an amazing canoeing place to go. This was on the river Warnow and was a 15km trip down river through a nature reserve. The initial part of our trip was a little more exercise than I’d have liked as we happened to set off at the same time as a large school trip of teenagers. Not wanting to enjoy the beauty and solitude of a nature reserve with 30 shrieking teenagers, we decided to use our superior canoeing skills to put some distance between us and them. Annoyingly though either we are shitter at canoeing than we thought or they were perhaps a school canoe team as we had to paddle REALLY hard to keep any distance between us and them. And when we did create some distance, we managed to catch up with a family that had decided to enhance their trip to this protected nature reserve by mounting a boombox onto their canoe in order to play some incredibly loud techno. Thankfully they decided to pull over for a break before I could ram them and knock their stupid boombox into the water, and shortly after that Marcel wanted to take a side stream so we could “have a picnic at a castle”. This involved some very hard paddling upstream through a shady, stinky mosquito swamp that didn’t actually end in a castle but just in a village with the German word for castle in. Thankfully there was a field we could eat our picnic lunch in, and that placated my bad mood somewhat.

The advantage of this stop was that by the time we rejoined the river, pretty much no one was on it. We still had about 8km to go and this was the wilder, less-maintained stretch with lots of weaving around trees to be done. German prep for these sort of trips is also a lot more casual than English prep so a good few times we were left wondering where to go and which part of a rocky course was better to navigate. But it was beautiful, sunny, thousands of electric blue damselflies constantly flitted around us and there was a spot for a gorgeous (albeit cold) swim.

We finally got into Lubeck and our ancient house in the evening. We then had a great dinner at a place called Schlumacher’s, so that was a great day out. We fell into bed pretty exhausted, and then I nearly fell out again, because that is the problem with elderly houses with subsidence.

The next day we decided to go on a tour of Lubeck. Lubeck clearly doesn’t get a lot of English-speaking tourists as it only has a once-weekly tour in English and that did not happen to coincide with our stays. Completely disregarding my previous experience of near total incomprehension with a german tour, I merrily signed us up for one again. This went slightly better initially as our tour guide was old so spoke slowly and bellowed loudly, but it was boiling hot, I rapidly fatigued and the tour was two incredibly hot hours and by the end I was desperate for him to stop talking as by this stage I wasn’t really getting any of it and everyone kept laughing at jokes I couldn’t get. I ate a huge ice cream to recover from the experience.

Lubeck is an ancient Hansa city that is pretty much entirely a UNESCO world-heritage site for ancient buildings. However the original city was built on swampy ground with some eccentric choices (like a fortified gate that had 3m thick walls on one-side and 1m thick on the other, leading the heavier side sinking a lot faster). The whole town is full of extremely wonky buildings, which you are fairly surprised are still standing. On the outside you can see essentially ornamental pole ends that support the floors and hold the two sides of the buildings together.

In the afternoon, hot and having toured most of Luebeck (as it prides itself on being “the city of short distances”), we decided to retire to the swimming lake opposite our front door. There we wiled away an enjoyable afternoon swimming, sunbathing and eating hot chips with mayonnaise. Glorious.

My grandfather was born in Kiel and the next day we had a plan to drop in there on the way to our next airbnb in the countryside. We had briefly considered staying in Kiel before we discovered it was Kieler Woche, which is some sort of sailing festival shebang. So we decided to limit it to a day trip.

It was exceedingly hot and our trip to Kiel brought forth the following observations 1) sailing festivals are pretty dull if you are on shore and thus are mostly a series of kiosks 2) Kiel was apparently bombed to the ground in WW2 but unlike areas that went for a painstaking reconstruction, they went for the construction of multiple ugly shopping malls 3) I know it sounds like it is impossible but apparently the town has absolutely no shade in it and I had forgotten to put suncream on and get extremely grumpy when I’m too hot.

So all in all, I would not recommend Kiel and our trip there was brief. By the end of a hot sweaty couple of hours there we were both dying for somewhere to cool down and so googled the nearest beaches. We found a nearby beach called Heidkate and headed straight for there.

How nice the beaches are around there appears to be a pretty well-kept secret (perhaps real Germans know. Imitation Germans like Marcel do not). Miles and miles of white sand, grassy dunes and the clean, calm Baltic sea. We found a quiet spot, quickly changed into our swimwear and raced into the...well, Baltic water. It was cold, but in a lovely cold way, especially when you are hot. And lead to the strange dichotomy of having a boiling hot upper half that was sweltering in the sun, and a frosty cold lower half. The sea was so calm between the groynes (and shallow) that even with my sea-phobia I swam again and again, in between coming up to lie on the beach and warm up thoroughly.

It was really tough to drag ourselves away...and we ended up leaving rather late (it stays very bright for a deceptively long time here so what we thought was about 5pm was actually 7pm) so we didn’t end up getting to our airbnb in the North Friesland (apparently Marcel says it is a byword for German hicks) until 9.30pm. It was still light though, so we hung out on our terrace and watched a huge number of bumblebees flitting between the wildflowers.

The next day we decided to visit both “seas”. First we headed to the North Sea. There are huge “sands” here called the Wattenmeer. Or at least that’s what I thought they were. What they actually are is enormous windswept mudflats. This is exactly as appealing as it sounds. It was also 7c colder than where we’d come from, so we hastily turned around and headed over to the Baltic side again.

We found ourselves a lovely stretch of sand near Flensburg from which you could pretty much spit on Denmark (should you so want; I quite like the Danes so didn’t). The sea was incredibly shallow and warm as we waded out over the white sandy sea bed. And then noticed we weren’t the only things who liked the warm and shallow water. There were hundreds and hundreds of moon jellyfish. These can’t sting people, but sharing the water with a huge number of dinner plate-sized jellyfish is just a bit...off-putting. I decided this would more be a reading on the beach afternoon than a swimming day.

The next morning we packed up and set off for Hamburg. Since our last couple of days were city days, we took the car to Hamburg airport, dropped it off in the lengthily car rental queue and took the S-Bahn into town. We checked into our hotel and went for lunch. Whilst waiting for our food, we got a call from Enterprise who were wondering where our car was. Because apparently we are sometimes great planners and book to drop our car off in the downtown area right by our hotel. It turns out though we are not great rememberers and were both convinced we had to drop it off at the airport. Somewhat mortifying. They did find the car eventually though.

Many, many years ago when I was at undergraduate, my friend had sent me a trailer for a place in Hamburg called Miniatur Wunderland as a piss-take. It showed a tiny model train world with dead prostitutes, red light districts and car accidents. I immediately was desperate to go. It took a long time to finally get there, but finally, finally it was time! Now you know when you hype something up massively, and then you go and it is actually a big disappointment? This was emphatically not one of those times! It was even better than I thought it was going to be. We spent three hours there and I could have easily spent longer watching tiny fire engines driving around putting out tiny fires and pressing buttons (there are so many buttons you can press to activate things- pro tip, visit in the late afternoon when all those 4 year olds that would normally be hogging them are having dinner). It was amazing. And also huge. I mean tiny, but huge in that it covers nearly two floors of a big warehouse.

The following morning we went on a free walking tour of the city. One of the things Miniatur Wunderland has is a tiny version of Hamburg. Having seen all of the sights in miniature the day before, this lead to a rather disorientating case of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, where I started to doubt what size they were, or I was. It is quite a pretty city though (on one side, on the other is about a million shipping containers and container ships).

It has always been a big shipping centre so there are lots of historic shipping offices in there. Our guide took us inside one, nominally to see the interior décor but actually so we could ride in a Paternoster lift. These are the endlessly moving doorless lifts that are super dangerous, so everyone else got rid of them. Germans however are weirdly protective over them and refuse to let them decommission them. And whilst I appreciate they are super dangerous for kids, the elderly, anyone moving slowly etc, they are pretty cool to ride. Marcel and I agreed it was pretty much the highlight of our day (nerds4eva).

After that we climbed a tower for the views, then had some lunch. Marcel decided he wanted to do a boat tour of the canals. There weren’t any English language ones but I decided it would probably be okay with German (having again, learnt nothing from prior experience). This time though I was completely screwed because we got on the boat last of all and so were sitting at the back. Where the speakers were broken. So I couldn’t even hear him properly. Anyway, Marcel said he had terrible and monotonous delivery, so I probably didn’t miss much. And it was a nice sunny day to be pottering about on a boat.

After that we decided to go through the Elbe tunnel. This is a 108 year old beautifully tiled tunnel under the Elbe. It has a few additional bonuses in addition to that. 1) you can ride down in giant freight lifts for the occasional cars they let through and 2) It is really nice and cool down there. During a heatwave in a city with no air-con, it was quite hard to feign interest in getting out on the other side to see the view.

A couple of years ago Hamburg completed their new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie. It was supposed to cost about 200 million euros and take 3 years to build. It overran by 7 years and the final cost was about 800 million euros. Had to admit to a slight schadenfreude in discovering we aren’t the only country that can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery when it comes to accurately and speedily building new projects. The concerts now sell out months in advance but you can get a free ticket to go inside it. So we did. Marcel was very excited as he discovered they have the world’s largest curved escalator. I was too because I imagined it might be curved in the way of a grand curved staircase in some Antebellum mansion. Actually it was just an hump-backed escalator. Underwhelming.

In the evening we decided to take full advantage of the fact our hotel was creepily empty despite being very nice (Marcel being blunt ended up asking why we were pretty much the only guests. They said it was because they’d newly opened, so I recommend getting in there for a stay before they fill up. Fraser Suites Hamburg) to use the sauna. I love saunas. However I normally only think of visiting them when it is cold out. It turns out if you’ve spent all day in a heatwave, it isn’t half as nice. Does mean if you wash your hair though it dries super fast, so less effort than a hair dryer.

Marcel knows me well so had booked a chocolate tour at Chocoversum for our final morning (softening the blow of leaving). I was keen because tours always involve free chocolate. But this was actually a really educational tour. You learnt all about the history of the plant, how to transport it in a cargo ship, how to roast and extract it, what all the machines are called and how they work, plus you get to make your own chocolate bar. So now if the apocalypse comes, I’m extremely prepared to restart civilisation/aka chocolate production.

After that Marcel wanted to walk around the Alster Lakes before our flight. It was pretty hot for walking but Marcel had picked a scenic restaurant quite far away. We got to there and it was a beautiful spot, on a pier so pretty much all of the tables had a lake view. To find it only took cash. And we were nowhere near an ATM and deliberately hadn’t got any more cash out because German ATMs charge you 5.99 to get cash out. So we turned back and found somewhere that would have been perfectly nice if we hadn’t just seen a better one.

And then, alas it was time to leave the Fatherland for the Motherland. It had been an amazing trip and we were pretty depressed to leave. But hey, London in summer is also full of endless sunny days...right?

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isolavirtuosa · 7 years

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Unlikely Office Romances 25

[fanfiction] Gundam Wing, 1x2x1

It’s the last part! Thanks for reading <3

Previous Parts

25 under the cut

- 25 -

“What are you doing here?!” Mariemaia demanded, and not in a happy way.

“We came to visit,” I said cheerfully.

“I thought you were on earth,” Quatre said. He scratched his chin, studying us both.

“What kind of loser comes to work during his vacation?” Mari tsked. She went back to examining her dead body.

“Wow, I’m so glad we flew all the way here to see you ungrateful jerks,” I said. “Let’s just go, Heero.”

Heero ignored me and started peering at the body. “Did you examine the fracturing on the right humerus?”

“Of course,” Mariemaia said, shaking her head.

“Are you that starved to be looking at dead bodies?” I muttered. “It’s been what? A whole three months?”

“I like dead bodies,” Heero protested.

I gawked at him.

He didn’t notice, because he was too busy looking at the dead body.

“You look… tan,” Quatre observed.

“We receive a lot of direct sunlight on earth,” Heero offered, despite being completely engrossed in what he was doing.

“We learned how to surf,” I put in.

Quatre smiled at that. “Really?”

“Yeah, we spent a lot of time in Australia.”

“Well, I gathered that from the pictures you were sending,” he said. “Heero was too cute with all those animals.”

“I know, right?” I gushed. Heero really was too cute.

“I’m not cute,” the man himself growled, then went back to arguing with Mariemaia about science crap.

“So you’re really just here to visit?”

I glanced at Heero. “Weirdly, yeah.” I left out the bit about Heero being homesick to see Mariemaia and his stupid hamsters. Quatre probably understood with his creepy space heart.

“Decided what you’re going to do with the rest of your life yet?”

“Right now, I’m leaning towards beach bum slash cargo pilot.”

“I can see that.”

My eyes fixed on Heero. He looked completely at ease.

“That’s not going to work for him, though, is it?” Quatre said, giving me a knowing look.

“His home is here,” I said with a little shrug.

“And your home is with him.”

I was physically repelled by that statement. “Why do you have to say things like that?!”

“Because they’re true?”

“Ughhh,” I groaned.

“I’ve been saying it since the war,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

“You have not,” I protested.

“There was always something inevitable about you two.”

“Uh, more like we are the most unlikely office romance ever.”

“Can you two girl-talk more quietly?” Heero complained, glaring at us over the top of his glasses.

I flipped him off, which Heero just sniffed at before turning his attention back to Mariemaia.

“Why don’t we go upstairs and get some coffee, since I am clearly not needed here anymore,” Quatre suggested, watching as Heero completely took over his job.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I rather drink terrible coffee than be here,” I agreed.

We headed up the elevator.

“Are you two okay?” Quatre asked, but he didn’t sound worried.

“Yeah, we’re good,” I said. “We have a lot of… communication issues, but… we’re happy.”

“You look happy,” he agreed.

“Is it my gorgeous sun-kissed skin?”

“Well, that just looks cancerous to me.”

“God, you sound like Heero sometimes.”

“Do I?” Quatre asked, sounding oddly pleased.

“I’m going to start calling you Instructor Q,” I muttered.

“I like doctor better.”

“Dr. Q it is.”

Wufei looked so annoyed to see me that I wrapped him in a hug.

Everyone else was out of the office, so it was kind of lonely. I almost wanted to alphabetize the storage room for old time’s sake. I was incredibly bored waiting for Heero, who decided to stay until the end of the working day despite being not an employee.

We headed to Mariemaia’s place after that, which was really Heero’s place. She was housesitting for him while we were gone. The hamsters wriggled their noses at us, and Heero seemed to take some kind of freakish delight in handing them sunflower seeds.

Okay, they were cute. But it was mostly cuteness by proximity to Heero.

“You’re not tired of him yet?” Mariemaia asked me while Heero washed the dishes. She made it sound like a joke, but it wasn’t.

“He drives me insane,” I answered honestly.

She eyed me.

“I like being driven insane?”

She cracked a smile.

“I can hear you,” Heero growled over the sound of running water.

“Of course you can, you mutant freak,” I muttered.

He raised up his middle finger without turning to look at me.

I cracked up.

Mariemaia just stared at his back incredulously. “You are a bad influence, Duo,” she finally concluded.

“He needs to express his aggression instead of bottling it up all the time,” I said, waving away her worries.

“I guess so…” Mariemaia said. She wrinkled her nose. “I feel like I’m looking at a stranger.”

Heero turned around sharply at that, a slight crease in his brow.

“I love ya, big bro,” she said, blowing him a kiss.

Heero looked disgruntled but appeased when he went back to washing the dishes.

“Hey, so he started doing mixed martial arts fighting!” I announced.

Mari went back to looking incredulous.

Heero and I walked back to the ship with our fingers twined.

He almost didn’t mind PDAs at all anymore. I still had to respect his ‘stop kissing me in public or I will knock you unconscious’ request, though.

I couldn’t help that I liked kissing Heero Yuy. I just needed to learn some self-control.

Kissing in the ship was fine, though.

“Do you really want to stay here for a whole two weeks?” I said, suddenly pulling away from him.

“Yes?” he said, his eyes asking me why we weren’t kissing anymore.

I gave him a peck, which quickly turned into a French, which quickly led to the bed. “Hey, wait, but seriously.”

Heero stared at me.

“What the hell am I supposed to do while you’re playing scientist in your lab?” I complained.

“Get a life?” Heero suggested. He got so much sassier when I was keeping him from what he wanted.

“Well, I’d love to, but Tro and Hil are on L3, so…”

“You only have two friends?”

“I only have two friends that I want to spend time with.”

Heero studied my face, sorting through the teasing and the joking to find the truth. “Why don’t you take the ship and stay on L3 until I’m finished?”

We’d been together so much lately that I’d forgotten that we could actually be in separate places at separate times. “Yeah?”

Heero nodded, playing with the hem of my t-shirt.

“Yeah?” I repeated, getting him to meet my gaze.

“I’ll miss you,” he said in a clipped monotone.

“I’ll miss you too, robot boyfriend,” I said, nipping his nose.

Heero scrunched his nose up, trying to protect it from my assault. The corners of his eyes crinkled in the faintest smile.

He still had a terrible smile, but I loved it.

“Okay, I’ll head over to L3,” I said, letting him pull my shirt over my head. “Give me something to remember you by.”

He stared at me like I was an idiot.

I took that as an open invitation to take off his pants.

For all our bickering, I thought we were very compatible in the bedroom.

Heero was still figuring things out, but he approached every sexual act like doctorate coursework that needed to be studied constantly and practiced thoroughly. I didn’t mind being his test subject.

“That is very nice,” I encouraged him, running my fingers through his hair while his head moved between my legs. “Very, very nice, top of the class.”

He glared at me.

I pulled his hair a little.

He growled.

I dropped my head back, deciding that my life was pretty great at the moment.

“Duo?”

“Mm?” I murmured, feeling very sated and relaxed.

Heero wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and came up off of the floor, settling his knees around my legs. “I would like to penetrate you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at his serious expression.

He frowned.

“I would enjoy being penetrated by you very much,” I offered.

He studied my face, and when I had gotten my amusement under control, he nodded. He was starting to understand that I didn’t mean to make fun of him, that I laughed when I was happy.

And he made me very happy.

He was such a cutie pie when he topped, with his serious blue eyes focused completely on mine, trying to read my every need to know how to better give me pleasure.

“Mm, like that,” I encouraged, directing him where to go.

He was like a very serious puppy sometimes. It made my heart ache, made me want to make stupid declarations that I couldn’t take back.

Instead I just held onto his hips very tightly and showed him what to do to make me unravel.

Big things come in small packages.

We cleaned up and got ready for bed, standing in front of the tiny bathroom mirror together while we brushed our teeth.

“We haven’t been away from one another for more than a few hours in months,” I observed through my toothpaste-filled mouth. “Are you sure you can survive being separated from me, your one true love?”

“I’ll try,” Heero said, spitting into the sink.

“You sound real broken up about it.”

“It will be an adjustment.”

“An adjustment…”

“But we’re separate people, living separate lives.”

“I see.”

His eyes caught mine in the mirror. “It’s strange how… you’ve become so much a part of me, and yet… just last year we barely spoke.”

“Pretty crazy,” I agreed, pressing my cheek to his as I hugged him from behind.

We looked at our reflections together.

“Two weeks is a long time,” I hummed.

“It’s actually a significantly short period of time in the scheme of a human being’s life.”

I groaned.

Heero smiled his threatening, terrifying smile.

I kissed his cute cheek. I was so smitten with this bizarre man.

“Mariemaia said that I’d… changed since we left.”

“Yeah, kinda,” I agreed.

“She said you changed, too.”

“Whaaaat?”

Heero shook his head at me.

“I’m always the same old me,” I protested. “Speaking of which, how about we have one more little sendoff before bed?” I suggested, rolling my hips into his very cute butt.

“We just got washed up,” Heero said. He wasn’t protesting so much as stating a fact.

“We can get washed up again,” I said cheerfully. “Whaddya say? A little in-n-out for the road?”

“You’re ridiculous,” he informed me, already moving back towards the bed.

“That’s my middle name!” I declared, throwing my boxers on the floor.

“You don’t have a middle name,” Heero responded automatically, already stripped naked with his clothes neatly folded on the dresser.

I admired his efficiency.

As much of a cutie pie as Heero was when he topped, he was downright adorable when he bottomed.

Heero Yuy was versatile.

“Duo…” he murmured, touching my face, holding my hand, kissing me anywhere he could.

Goddamn if I didn’t always come first.

I held onto him for as long as I could before he rolled over to his side of the bed.

The next morning we had an anticlimactic goodbye.

“Bye,” Heero said, swinging his bag over his shoulder and leaving.

“Hey!” I protested, chasing him into the shipyard in just my boxers.

“Is something the matter?”

I stared at him.

He stared back. Then he turned abruptly on his heel and continued leaving.

I caught his arm, and I felt the tension in it, knew that he had let me do it but hadn’t wanted to. “Give me a proper goodbye, Yuy!” I demanded, whirling him around.

He looked sad.

Of course, he wouldn’t look sad to a normal person. There was just this slight extra frowniness to his frown.

“See you soon,” I said, giving him a smooch.

“Soon,” he agreed, squeezing my hand and quickly walking away.

We didn’t know what we were going to do. We talked about opening a bounty hunting office. We talked about Heero becoming an agent. We talked about me being a housewife. We even talked about working for the Preventers part-time while running a bakery on the side. I don’t know why, because neither of us baked. We talked about just being together, sitting in my ship and looking at all the stars in the distance, and that was all we needed.

I had no idea what the fuck I was doing with my life, and that was okay.

Now I was going to visit my two best friends while they hunted down illegal aircraft operators on L3. Then I would go back to L1 and pick up my robot boyfriend, and we’d blast off into space together on our next probably pretty dull adventure.

Someone should write a book about it.

#gundam wing #fanfiction #1x2x1 #1x2 #unlikely office romances isola

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