self-exploding boy

I think the way to understand 1x2's appeal starts with what kinds of care Heero's nervous system can actually metabolize. By the time he reaches the war, he's already learned to sort care into two kinds. One is verbal, emotionally direct, expressive. He got this from his mother when he was small (according to Frozen Teardrop, at least), and what he got from her along with it was abandonment and inconsistency bordering on negligence, so his system learned early to read that mode of warmth as something that lies. The other is silent, action-based, logistical. He got this from Odin Lowe (whether you accept him as Heero's father like in FT, or just a caregiver as in Episode Zero), who fed and trained him for years and never once said anything that resembled love, but kept him alive and showed that he cared in his own messed-up way. Heero's system trusts the second mode by default and treats the first as a probable threat.

That distinction explains how he relates to the three most important relationships he forms during the war: Relena, Duo, and Trowa.

Relena, who walks up to him on a beach in episode one and just cares, openly, is operating in the mode his nervous system distrusts. She's verbal. She makes direct claims about connection. She – a civilian – refuses to be afraid of him no matter how many times he threatens her, which produces effects in his system he has no protocol for. His brain short-circuits when she's around until he finds a way to contain the breach.

We see his confusion over his inability to kill her many times over, but that's a topic for the full thesis. What I want to say here is that by the end of the war, the only way Heero can integrate what Relena means to him is to rebuild it as a mission. He doesn't fall for her. He decides to protect her dream of peace, which is a function he can perform without admitting to the feeling underneath. That's not nothing. It's actually a significant accommodation, given what his psyche was built to do, but it's a workaround, not Heero opening up. Heero equates self-worth with function, and Relena becomes that function.

Duo lands in the other mode entirely. He arrives as a fellow operative, a Gundam pilot with his own competence and his own grief, someone whose function Heero can immediately recognize. He shoots Heero in episode two and then helps him escape the hospital an episode later, and the friction-wrapped care is exactly the kind Heero's system permits. There's no demand for emotional reciprocity. There's no insistence that Heero acknowledge anything about himself. Duo even tells Heero that he doesn't have to trust him. No strings attached. And he just keeps showing up, talking, being present, regardless of whether Heero responds or how much of a jerk Heero is. Duo is silent water on stone. He erodes the defensive surface so gradually that the surface doesn't notice it happening.

More importantly, this lets Duo give Heero something no one else does: permission to be a teenage boy. They play basketball at the hideout school. They turn missions to destroy military bases into a competitive game and keep a kill count. They banter. Heero even allows casual touch (twice in the entire show, but a lot for a guy like Heero).

Heero, who has never in his life experienced unstructured social time with someone his own age, gets a small pocket of it with Duo. The copilot seat moment in episode 7 is proof of how quickly Heero had come to feel at ease around him. Heero, who is obsessively protective of his Gundam (more on that in my thesis), lets Duo fly a plane and sits in the copilot seat without a single word of comment. Enormous trust, expressed entirely through silence.

And when Heero is ordered to eliminate Duo after he's captured by OZ, he stages a rescue instead. He's already arranged a safe landing, school enrolment, the next phase of cover. He frames the whole thing as logistics, because logistics is the only frame his system has for the kind of care he's actually performing. None of this is small. Duo is, by a wide margin, the relationship in Heero's life that costs him the least and gives him the most ease.

But ease isn't depth. Duo gets the surface. He gets the version of Heero whose defenses don't have to engage, because Duo never triggers them. He doesn't see Heero in a state where the operational facade has been forced offline. He doesn't know about Odin. He doesn't even get Heero's codename (he hears it from Sally). On the Peacemillion, when he watches Heero bring in ZERO and says he's "nothing like us humans," the line tells us exactly what Heero looks like from where Duo is standing: the front rooms of the house, the lit ones, the ones with the visible furniture. Duo sees the surface, not the boy.

Trowa, on the other hand, walks through a door Duo doesn't know exists.

After Heero self-detonates Wing, Trowa pulls his body out and hides him at the circus. This is a stretch of weeks during which Heero is unconscious and Trowa feeds him, tends to him, asks nothing, and tells no one. Heero is in a state of total physical helplessness with a stranger who has every operational reason to turn him in or kill him, and who instead just keeps him alive. By the time Heero is functional again, the bond has formed in a place the defenses couldn't guard, because the defenses were physically offline for the duration.

This is what I mean by depth. Heero spent more uninterrupted time with Trowa in that one stretch of coma, recovery, and the search for redemption from the Noventas, than he spent with Duo or Relena across the entire series combined. The Heero and Relena relationship that fandom carries in its head is built out of maybe a dozen brief encounters, most of them under thirty seconds, most of them with Heero either threatening her or walking away. Duo is similar. Denser per minute, but the minutes are few. Trowa got weeks of access, in conditions Heero would never have permitted anyone else.

You can see what that produced by looking at what Heero gives Trowa that he gives no one else. He give him the line Odin Lowe left Heero with before he died (act on your emotions). It is the closest thing Heero has to an inherited inner life. It came from love rather than from training. It is, by far, his most precious piece of verbal inheritance. He gives it to Trowa. Twice. He gives it to no one else. Not Duo. Not Relena. It happens with the person who saw him in the state where he couldn't perform anything.

And Trowa returns the care in the same mode it was offered. When Heero's arm is injured, Trowa quietly reconfigures Heavyarms' controls so the damage doesn't keep him from piloting. He doesn't announce it, he just does it. That's care expressed entirely through logistics, and it's the same shape as the man who raised Heero. The silent kind. The action-based kind. The kind Heero's system trusts at the deepest level, because that's the kind that's never lied to him.

I can go on and on about Heero and Trowa's relationship, but I'll leave that to the thesis. It's not the subject of this post.

For now, I'd suggest thinking of it this way:

Relena is a verbal claim of care that Heero's system can only handle by turning her into a mission. Duo is the relationship that costs the least, the one that gives Heero a small pocket of normalcy and the closest thing to teenage friendship he ever gets. Trowa is the one who got inside the walls, and the only person who receives the parts of Heero's interior life that aren't operational.

Duo is the one Heero would willingly share a year-long safehouse with. Trowa is the one who would already know what Heero needed without being told. Relena is the one Heero would rearrange his entire purpose around without ever admitting it to her or to himself.

Fandom has long read the Heero/Duo dynamic as romantic, and the reading is understandable, because ease is so rare in Heero's life that it can look, from certain angles, like love. The absence of drama between them feels more intimate than the drama Heero shares with Relena, because drama requires Heero's defenses to engage, while ease suggests they've stood down.

But what the on-screen evidence actually shows is something more limited and, in its own way, more interesting: not love, but the first proof of concept that closeness doesn't have to be a crisis. For a character whose every bond has come with a price, a bond that simply exists without extracting payment is its own kind of revolution. No one could argue that Heero and Duo are friends. Good ones. The Endless Waltz novels tell us that they work so well together because they are two opposites of the same coin.

And, let's be honest here, people love shipping the brooding silent type with the carefree, energetic type. The trope works.

The 1x2 ship is the loudest because Duo is, on the surface, the most legible. His care is recognizable as care because he's vocal about it and physically demonstrative. Relena's care is dramatic almost in the theatrical sense, which is why it gets rejected so many times. Trowa's care is so quiet that the fandom underreads it. But it's there, and in my opinion, it's the deepest thing Heero has.

Anyway, this is a sliver of a much longer essay I'm still drafting. In it I cover, among other things, a close scene-by-scene reading of all three major relationships (Relena, Duo, and Trowa), with no ship in mind. Just a literary analysis. Happy to come back with the full thing once it's done if anyone's interested.