Often, it comes and goes without much fanfare and it's only in retrospection that you realize, that was the moment that shaped the rest of your future.

There were those who thought after Marimaia's War, Heero and Relena would hook up. They did, for a while and appeared, at least on the surface, to be happy. Those of us who knew them, knew why it didn't last. It wasn't that she was a raging bitch or he was a hard-hearted bastard.

No, it was simply competing ideologies -- Relena's drive to be a moving force in world peace; Heero's desire to simply fade into the woodwork. Her work took her into the limelight and he didn't want to share that with her.

All of us had our reasons for moving on. Wufei was the only one interested in actively keeping an eye on things and he joined the Preventers. I hear he and Sally are expecting their first baby in about 8 weeks.

Noin and Zechs, no one's heard from them in almost a year. Then again, the Mars Project was pretty high level and on a need-to-know basis, so it follows I wouldn't know dick. I just hope they're okay.

The rest of us? Just wanted to get on with our lives. Our plans.

Lofty, philanthropic and so-very-Quatre opened a new construction company dedicated to helping not only the colonies but the Earth to build and move forward to a new future.

Trowa went back to the circus. There was rumor he and Quatre had a thing but I've fallen so out of touch with them I don't know where it stands now.

Me? Typical, I suppose, I took over Howard's salvage business when he retired. Said he was tired of it all, sold out and is currently living in Fiji or some out of the way place like that drinking drinks with those stupid little umbrellas he collected.

No one knew what happened to Heero for the longest time. He just disappeared and left the rest of us in our own peace.

And our lives clicked on.

It was kind of surprising, then, when he showed up here at the office one afternoon. No warning, which was so very like Heero, with just a dufflebag and his shy and uncertain smile. Did I ever tell you how warm his smiles made me? No? Let me tell you now, the guy can melt my underwear elastic with one of his smiles and only because during the war they were just so rare.

I invited him in and we had drinks. Lots of drinks. Many, many drinks and we talked. A lot. About so much. Everything. How we were then, where we were now. How he'd drifted from one place to the next to see the world left behind after being ravaged by war. How what he'd seen had made him realize a great many things about himself. And what he wanted. But he wouldn't say more than that and I think the alcohol finally took us both under.

He stayed the night.

Then another. And...you got it, another.

We never did get back to talking about the realizations of what he wanted. I figured, when he was ready, he would and put it out of my mind.

It's been six months now and we are settling into a routine that seems to make us both happy. I mean, I'll admit, I kept waiting for the other boot to drop and he'd take off, having had enough of being in one place.

But at least he smiled a lot those days. That was important to me. He didn't smile near enough during the war so to see it on a regular basis? Well, do I need to tell you that I'd gone through a lot of pairs of underwear?

Now you'd think the defining moment in our relationship was when he showed up on my doorstep out of the blue. Or even our first time in bed which was so incredible it makes my toes curl still thinking about it.

It was actually when he made waffles one morning.

See, it was a particularly cold morning and after a late night on a difficult salvage mission, we all slept in. All of us except Heero.

It was waking up to the smell of waffles and walking in to the kitchen to watch him working as efficiently as he's known to work, making waffles with that military precision of his -- that it hit me.

He was here. He was mine. And I knew he was in for the long haul.