((Okay. First a few things. From one obsessed fan to another. I still don't own this, please don't sue me?
Next. I usually am against posting stories chapter by chapter. Although the suspense might be good that way, I've always hated being left in the dark and not knowing when or if I'd find out what happened next. So typically I avoid writing like that myself, because there is no reason to further provoke insanity in readers... However this time I'll be doing just that, and namely for the reason of my first fic I ever wrote and the sweet reviews that three people gave me on that. I suspect that it'll have about six chapters when it's done, but I don't know yet, so be patient with me. Anyways, this fic is dedicated to the three kind people who gave me such sweet reviews and nearly left me in tears of gratitude, since that's the reason I was motivated at all to try and do another. That probably sounds odd, but I hate to lie. So thank you, jkb, MissyIrene, and Merit Somnia.))
-----
"Winner! You gods forsaken fool, get out of the way!"
Quatre's shoulders slumped with the weight of some invisible burden as he slipped quickly through the door of their safe house and into the dark living room. Behind him entered the rest of his team, Wufei still glaring in his direction as he assisted Trowa inside, the tall brunette quite noticeably favoring his right leg where a makeshift split lay. Behind them was Duo and Heero, and neither of them looked precisely pleased either. Heero had part of Duo's shirt wound around his upper left bicep, but spots of red were already seeping through on it, and Duo's hair was messily fluffed up around his face like that of a peeved cat. Little scrapes were tinted red on his cheeks and forehead, leftover wounds from their two mile trek back to the jeep… A walk that had led them through a rain-covered forest and several unavoidable stretches of thorn bushes.
All of the team was thoroughly soaked, water running from their torn clothing and pooling in darker puddles on the faded carpet of this small apartment, and most all were bleeding from some wound or another. And it was all Quatre's fault.
He more or less slunk over to the lumpy couch that dominated most of the floor space in these small chambers and cradled his head in small hands. He would have tried to help with the more seriously injured ones, either with Trowa and his broken leg, or with Heero and his gunshot wound, but when he'd done so earlier all he'd gotten was Duo rather angrily saying he had it covered and Wufei coming within an inch of punching him. He didn't necessarily blame them.
-----
It was that child that caused Quatre to make a rash decision, and caused the mess they were now suffering through. The mission, just your standard infiltrate, 'place bombs, download information, then get out and set off said bombs', had been going fine until he'd seen that child. Duo and Trowa were off placing explosives, Duo supposedly doing it room by room and Trowa somewhere up in the air vents to get into the harder to reach areas. Wufei was outside as look out, watching the building from a peak a few hundred feet away and ready to alert them of any trouble at a moments notice. And Heero and him were in the main computer room of the base. While the brunette was seated at a terminal and working on hacking his way into the system, Quatre had heard a sniffle from one corner where there shouldn't have been one.
Peeking over the back of the large computer set-ups, he'd seen a little shape curled up in the shadowy corner, and that shape had been moving. Even in the dark, he could see the huge doe-like brown eyes staring back at him. Before anyone could have said or done anything, Quatre had moved around the desks and approached, gun drawn and his finger on the trigger, ready to kill whatever guard had seen them and could identify him. But then he heard the soft sob of terror and understood.
Instantly his weapon was put away and before he knew it, he was cradling the young boy in his arms and trying to hush him. The child couldn't have been more then five years old, his dark blonde hair a tarnished halo around cherubic features and eyes glimmering with fresh tears. Quatre didn't question why he was there, in the computer room of an OZ base in the middle of the night, he just tried to calm him. The fear he felt radiating from that small form was enough to make his heart ache in sympathy. By the time Heero had looked up from his own part of the mission, the young Winner heir was opening the door of the computer room and shooing the boy out.
Heero was on his feet in seconds and tearing after the boy, pulling his gun and spitting some unintelligible reprimand in Quatre's direction as he moved to the door. Quatre had cut him off with his spread body across the opening, trying to use their mission as a reason to hurry and not to give chase. The stoic face of Heero silently called him a fool, but after poking his head into the hall and already seeing the child gone, in any number of possible directions, he had turned back to the terminal and together they had started downloading the information they needed.
The alarms went off about a minute later.
They hadn't had a chance to get the data before the door flew open and there were guards everywhere. He and Heero had been forced to turn and dive through the long picture glass window at the front of the room with bullets flying past them like hellish confetti. Heero had been hit then. The worst he'd suffered and only discovered later, was a small burnt hole in the collar of his shirt. Another inch and it would have torn through his throat, but he'd been lucky. They hit the ground some twenty feet below, tucked in on themselves and rolled down the embankment of the base and towards the dark woods surrounding it. Above them in the hulking form of the base, chaos reigned on.
Heero and he started towards the vehicle they'd left parked some distance away, walking in silence since the first time Quatre had tried to check that wound and had gotten one of Heero's best death glares and a shove that sent him barreling into the trunk of a nearby tree, but he got the details from the others when they met there. Duo had gotten automatically locked in one of the office rooms he was trying to bomb, and he didn't even have the options of windows they'd had. He'd ended up having to wiggle his way down a dumb-waiter and into the base's kitchen, and then had to break out of a garbage shoot to even get outside… Then only to discovered he was enclosed in a barbwire fence. When he'd actually reached the jeep, his cloths had been hanging in shreds off him and he smelled like something that had died last week.
Trowa faired even worse. Those alarms hadn't caught him trapped anywhere, but when they went off and there was suddenly the thunder of feet beneath him as the guards ran wild; in surprise at the sudden noise in the previously silent night, he'd dropped the flashlight he was holding in his teeth and it created a rather loud echoing sound through the air ducts. Below steps had stopped and they'd aimed their guns upwards in unison. Miraculously, he'd managed not to get utterly ripped apart by those careless bullets, only receiving a graze on one shoulder and then another going through his boot and thus through the soft pad of his left foot. He'd scurried through the small, silver square corridors like a rat in a maze, and finally emerged among the pink instillation fluff of the top floor. But the guards weren't far behind.
The only exit in that make-shift attic turned out to be a small circular window, and just as the herd of guards were yanking down the trap door and preparing to come up and shoot Trowa like a fish in a barrel, the circus employee dove through the thin glass and out into the dark of night beyond it. He was about four stories up, and could have snapped his neck from a fall like that, but luckily a tree broke his fall. Unfortunately, that tree also broke his leg.
They'd survived with their lives, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. What should have been an amazingly simple mission became a disaster, and Heero had told them all why when they'd all emerged and were standing beside the branch masked vehicle. Since then, Quatre had apologized numerous times and his teammates hadn't cooled down even one iota. Even Duo, who the blonde regarded as his best friend and normally the most cheerfully optimistic of their little group, was snappy and told him to just shut up right now. He hadn't said much since that.
-----
Duo led his wounded boyfriend over to the other side of the couch and gently set Heero down, looking over him with concerned eyes. He looked a little like a mother hen as he fluffed a pillow and set it behind the brunette's head. "Wait here, I'll get the med kit and we'll have that bullet out before long."
"I don't need it right now, just hand me my laptop."
Same old Heero. The braided boy ignored the request and made his way towards the hallway and to their small bathroom, and Quatre thought it likely Heero wouldn't get his computer until Duo was sure he was properly taken care of. Trowa, who was being lowered into one of two patch-covered armchairs in the living room, rolled his eyes slightly then closed them as a wave of pain washed over him like ice water. The Chinese youth noticed this and shot Quatre another look that clearly said 'are you regretting your foolish choices yet', but kept his mouth closed against any more verbal insults.
He didn't need to say anything anyway, Quatre had also seen that shift in Trowa and he looked ready to start crying. He opened his mouth to offer another apology, and this time was silenced by Heero's head jerking in his direction and his monotone voice breaking the quiet.
"Don't. Even. Say. It. If I hear you say you're sorry one more time, I'll kill you, Quatre. You knew better. You knew you shouldn't have even when you were doing it. You fucked up, and we failed."
Wufei tensed at the reprimand, then nodded in agreement as he started fixing Trowa's split properly. Even Trowa, who was usually so unexplainably different when it came to the blonde, looked like he was agreeing with the sense of Heero's statement if not with the words themselves.
Quatre's head drooped, his response just a remorseful whisper. "I know… But he was just a kid, Heero."
"A kid who was somewhere he had no place being! A kid, awake at midnight and in one of the enemies computer rooms! And YOU just let him walk away!" Cobalt eyes were now flashing with anger, and Quatre just knew it was because he was thinking about what he'd have to write in his report tonight.
By then, Wufei just had to interject his own thoughts in the matter. "At the very least, you could have knocked him out, Winner, and left him there. He would have been fine and then none of this would have happened."
"I'm sorry! I didn't think of that at the time, he was upset and I just wanted to calm him down! I let him go, I messed up and I know it! I'm sorry you guys got hurt and maybe I would handle it different if I had another chance, but I don't regret letting him live even if he did cause us getting caught."
Heero only heard the first part of Quatre's sharp response, that apology. He stood up and reached for the gun on his back, pulling it out and lifting it to the blonde's face to make good on his earlier statement only to find Duo suddenly back and standing between him, the med kit held to his chest like some freakish teddy bear.
"Put that damned thing away, Heero. Right now. He didn't kill the kid, I couldn't have either. He just didn't make the right choice and I think that's pretty understandable considering what was going on at the time. He is sorry, and although that doesn't make up for what happened and he knows it, shooting him isn't going to do any good either. It'll just be another piece of crap that happened tonight that you'll have to explain. So put that thing back in your pants." Looking over his shoulder to Quatre, Duo's face was pale other then two upset patches of red high on his cheeks. He was being forced to come between his boyfriend and his best friend, and it was straining him. "And Quatre, just go to your room, okay? Get in there and let us clean this thing up."
"But Duo, I can-"
"Quatre, bug off. Please?"
It was how tired Duo sounded that forced him to agree. He stared at his friend until Duo's form started to shimmer like a mirage from the tears he couldn't hold back, then rose jerkily from the chair and stumbled his way down the hall. As he was walking away he heard Heero's soft comment 'you should have let me shoot him' like something from a bad dream.
-----
Sleep took a long time to overtake him. He had entered the room he shared with Trowa, (the small, already furnished apartment in the nowhere town they were using as a safe house only had three bedrooms, and after Duo and Heero had claimed one for themselves and their rambunctious activities, Wufei in one and he and Trowa in the other had seemed the most reasonable arrangement) and moved to flop onto on side of the lumpy bed. There was only one of them in here, some huge thing that looked fifty years old, but with how small he was and how thin Trowa was, it wasn't much a problem.
With one hand tucked behind his head and the other thrown carelessly over his flat midsection, Quatre had lain there for about an hour. His tears had dried up as soon as he'd come in here; despite his emotional state, he just couldn't see the point to them and didn't have the energy for it. He lay and listened to the rise and fall of his teams' voices in the living room, the anger in Heero's like a dull blade in his mind, Duo's exhausted attempts at peacemaking icing on a very bitter cake.
He barely heard Trowa, just a loud sound and then a pained gasp that he thought could have been his green eyed friend, and oh how that made his heart break. Wufei's voice was just a soft presence behind Duo and Heero's, and it was while he was trying to focus on his distant words that he finally drifted off into a troubled sleep.
An hour later the door open and with bleary eyes, he watched Trowa make his limping way over to the bed. The light of the moon through the thin gauze of old lace curtains illuminated the tallest of the pilots while he struggled through removing his shirt. Quatre didn't want to embarrass Trowa by watching, or to let him know he was awake and be forced into conversation by rolling onto his other side to give Trowa the privacy he deserved. But he did close his eyes as the edge of that green turtle neck was finally lifted from a muscular midsection and started inching upwards.
His decision was made for him when he heard it drop to the floor in a hiss of fabric and then heard the tired grunt from Trowa as he started trying to handle his pants. He knew that his friend was in for a lot of effort with that task, since the pant leg had been torn to allow Wufei to treat him and he wasn't going to be able to slide them down without some help. Quatre sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, glancing up at the green eyed boy in silence explanation as he reached for the fastens on Trowa's jeans.
After a moment where Trowa froze like a statue, the 'it's Quatre' truth clicked in his mind and he allowed his hands to fall away. Just turned his head to the side, permission for Quatre's help given without an uttered word on it. But he did have something to say and within the safety of his room with Quatre, he felt securing in doing so. "Heero shouldn't have said that. Or pulled his gun."
"I know…" He started carefully pulling the waist of Trowa's pants down, using one hand to lightly hold the hem of what proved to be dark green boxers so they wouldn't come as well. He knew there was more to come. After forming a strange and comfortable friendship with the quiet pilot of Heavyarms, he'd come to understand certain things about the other boy.
"But he's right about the boy. You acted foolishly. We could have all been killed."
He winced and bit back on the apology building in his throat, lowering his head as he took one of Trowa's hands and braced it on his shoulder so that the taller boy could free his uninjured leg without too much trouble or pain. "I know."
"We failed the mission, and that's one thing Heero's really mad about. And this is the first one he's been on since he and Duo started dating. I think it scared him to have to think of Duo getting hurt, whether he'll admit it to himself or not. That's why he's so mad with you. Not the report, or even the data."
Again came that soft and tragically unhappy response. "I know, Trowa."
Trowa looked down at the blonde as he shifted out of his pants, then sat awkwardly on the bed to start working on the real task. Getting the skin tight jeans he insisted on wearing off around the bulky brace holding his leg together. Once he was settled, he reached a long hand out to tip Quatre's face up and give him one of those rare smiles that usually forced Quatre to return it. "We're alive though… You made a mistake, but we are all going to live, and I know you won't make it again. He'll realize that tomorrow and things will cool down."
Today Quatre's face remained pinched in worry when he did that though, and the best Trowa got for his effort was a slight slackening in the frown that dominated full pink lips. The blonde sank down and muttered a 'sorry' as he tore Trowa's jeans further, and then pulled the offending material away. That sad expression, even after what had happened tonight, bothered Trowa… But for right now he was just too tired to think on it or try to get rid of it. He thanked Quatre, then fell back on the flat pillows at the head of the bed.
From within a soft cloud of exhaustion, he felt the small pilot tuck him in under the thin blankets, and then that telltale shift of the bed as Quatre himself crawled in and wiggled around into a comfortable position beside him. He'd shared rooms with him enough to know almost all of the blonde's quirks, and knew that Quatre was probably going to be tossing and turning all night from just those few signs. Maybe even with those nightmares he occasionally woke Trowa up with by flailing and never wanted to talk about.
However, if he did any of those things, Trowa never felt it. He dozed off within seconds and didn't wake until the healthy hour of eight the next morning when his leg started to sing with sharp pain. After going back to sleep failed as an option, he decided to see if Quatre was up, to ask him if he could please get some of the painkillers they carried in the kit and bring them to the room if it wasn't too much hassle since he refused to spend the day bedridden.
Rolling over onto his side with a low groan, he reached to touch Quatre's shoulder, and when he did, he saw that the blonde was already gone.
He'd been wrong about things cooling down.
Next. I usually am against posting stories chapter by chapter. Although the suspense might be good that way, I've always hated being left in the dark and not knowing when or if I'd find out what happened next. So typically I avoid writing like that myself, because there is no reason to further provoke insanity in readers... However this time I'll be doing just that, and namely for the reason of my first fic I ever wrote and the sweet reviews that three people gave me on that. I suspect that it'll have about six chapters when it's done, but I don't know yet, so be patient with me. Anyways, this fic is dedicated to the three kind people who gave me such sweet reviews and nearly left me in tears of gratitude, since that's the reason I was motivated at all to try and do another. That probably sounds odd, but I hate to lie. So thank you, jkb, MissyIrene, and Merit Somnia.))
-----
"Winner! You gods forsaken fool, get out of the way!"
Quatre's shoulders slumped with the weight of some invisible burden as he slipped quickly through the door of their safe house and into the dark living room. Behind him entered the rest of his team, Wufei still glaring in his direction as he assisted Trowa inside, the tall brunette quite noticeably favoring his right leg where a makeshift split lay. Behind them was Duo and Heero, and neither of them looked precisely pleased either. Heero had part of Duo's shirt wound around his upper left bicep, but spots of red were already seeping through on it, and Duo's hair was messily fluffed up around his face like that of a peeved cat. Little scrapes were tinted red on his cheeks and forehead, leftover wounds from their two mile trek back to the jeep… A walk that had led them through a rain-covered forest and several unavoidable stretches of thorn bushes.
All of the team was thoroughly soaked, water running from their torn clothing and pooling in darker puddles on the faded carpet of this small apartment, and most all were bleeding from some wound or another. And it was all Quatre's fault.
He more or less slunk over to the lumpy couch that dominated most of the floor space in these small chambers and cradled his head in small hands. He would have tried to help with the more seriously injured ones, either with Trowa and his broken leg, or with Heero and his gunshot wound, but when he'd done so earlier all he'd gotten was Duo rather angrily saying he had it covered and Wufei coming within an inch of punching him. He didn't necessarily blame them.
-----
It was that child that caused Quatre to make a rash decision, and caused the mess they were now suffering through. The mission, just your standard infiltrate, 'place bombs, download information, then get out and set off said bombs', had been going fine until he'd seen that child. Duo and Trowa were off placing explosives, Duo supposedly doing it room by room and Trowa somewhere up in the air vents to get into the harder to reach areas. Wufei was outside as look out, watching the building from a peak a few hundred feet away and ready to alert them of any trouble at a moments notice. And Heero and him were in the main computer room of the base. While the brunette was seated at a terminal and working on hacking his way into the system, Quatre had heard a sniffle from one corner where there shouldn't have been one.
Peeking over the back of the large computer set-ups, he'd seen a little shape curled up in the shadowy corner, and that shape had been moving. Even in the dark, he could see the huge doe-like brown eyes staring back at him. Before anyone could have said or done anything, Quatre had moved around the desks and approached, gun drawn and his finger on the trigger, ready to kill whatever guard had seen them and could identify him. But then he heard the soft sob of terror and understood.
Instantly his weapon was put away and before he knew it, he was cradling the young boy in his arms and trying to hush him. The child couldn't have been more then five years old, his dark blonde hair a tarnished halo around cherubic features and eyes glimmering with fresh tears. Quatre didn't question why he was there, in the computer room of an OZ base in the middle of the night, he just tried to calm him. The fear he felt radiating from that small form was enough to make his heart ache in sympathy. By the time Heero had looked up from his own part of the mission, the young Winner heir was opening the door of the computer room and shooing the boy out.
Heero was on his feet in seconds and tearing after the boy, pulling his gun and spitting some unintelligible reprimand in Quatre's direction as he moved to the door. Quatre had cut him off with his spread body across the opening, trying to use their mission as a reason to hurry and not to give chase. The stoic face of Heero silently called him a fool, but after poking his head into the hall and already seeing the child gone, in any number of possible directions, he had turned back to the terminal and together they had started downloading the information they needed.
The alarms went off about a minute later.
They hadn't had a chance to get the data before the door flew open and there were guards everywhere. He and Heero had been forced to turn and dive through the long picture glass window at the front of the room with bullets flying past them like hellish confetti. Heero had been hit then. The worst he'd suffered and only discovered later, was a small burnt hole in the collar of his shirt. Another inch and it would have torn through his throat, but he'd been lucky. They hit the ground some twenty feet below, tucked in on themselves and rolled down the embankment of the base and towards the dark woods surrounding it. Above them in the hulking form of the base, chaos reigned on.
Heero and he started towards the vehicle they'd left parked some distance away, walking in silence since the first time Quatre had tried to check that wound and had gotten one of Heero's best death glares and a shove that sent him barreling into the trunk of a nearby tree, but he got the details from the others when they met there. Duo had gotten automatically locked in one of the office rooms he was trying to bomb, and he didn't even have the options of windows they'd had. He'd ended up having to wiggle his way down a dumb-waiter and into the base's kitchen, and then had to break out of a garbage shoot to even get outside… Then only to discovered he was enclosed in a barbwire fence. When he'd actually reached the jeep, his cloths had been hanging in shreds off him and he smelled like something that had died last week.
Trowa faired even worse. Those alarms hadn't caught him trapped anywhere, but when they went off and there was suddenly the thunder of feet beneath him as the guards ran wild; in surprise at the sudden noise in the previously silent night, he'd dropped the flashlight he was holding in his teeth and it created a rather loud echoing sound through the air ducts. Below steps had stopped and they'd aimed their guns upwards in unison. Miraculously, he'd managed not to get utterly ripped apart by those careless bullets, only receiving a graze on one shoulder and then another going through his boot and thus through the soft pad of his left foot. He'd scurried through the small, silver square corridors like a rat in a maze, and finally emerged among the pink instillation fluff of the top floor. But the guards weren't far behind.
The only exit in that make-shift attic turned out to be a small circular window, and just as the herd of guards were yanking down the trap door and preparing to come up and shoot Trowa like a fish in a barrel, the circus employee dove through the thin glass and out into the dark of night beyond it. He was about four stories up, and could have snapped his neck from a fall like that, but luckily a tree broke his fall. Unfortunately, that tree also broke his leg.
They'd survived with their lives, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. What should have been an amazingly simple mission became a disaster, and Heero had told them all why when they'd all emerged and were standing beside the branch masked vehicle. Since then, Quatre had apologized numerous times and his teammates hadn't cooled down even one iota. Even Duo, who the blonde regarded as his best friend and normally the most cheerfully optimistic of their little group, was snappy and told him to just shut up right now. He hadn't said much since that.
-----
Duo led his wounded boyfriend over to the other side of the couch and gently set Heero down, looking over him with concerned eyes. He looked a little like a mother hen as he fluffed a pillow and set it behind the brunette's head. "Wait here, I'll get the med kit and we'll have that bullet out before long."
"I don't need it right now, just hand me my laptop."
Same old Heero. The braided boy ignored the request and made his way towards the hallway and to their small bathroom, and Quatre thought it likely Heero wouldn't get his computer until Duo was sure he was properly taken care of. Trowa, who was being lowered into one of two patch-covered armchairs in the living room, rolled his eyes slightly then closed them as a wave of pain washed over him like ice water. The Chinese youth noticed this and shot Quatre another look that clearly said 'are you regretting your foolish choices yet', but kept his mouth closed against any more verbal insults.
He didn't need to say anything anyway, Quatre had also seen that shift in Trowa and he looked ready to start crying. He opened his mouth to offer another apology, and this time was silenced by Heero's head jerking in his direction and his monotone voice breaking the quiet.
"Don't. Even. Say. It. If I hear you say you're sorry one more time, I'll kill you, Quatre. You knew better. You knew you shouldn't have even when you were doing it. You fucked up, and we failed."
Wufei tensed at the reprimand, then nodded in agreement as he started fixing Trowa's split properly. Even Trowa, who was usually so unexplainably different when it came to the blonde, looked like he was agreeing with the sense of Heero's statement if not with the words themselves.
Quatre's head drooped, his response just a remorseful whisper. "I know… But he was just a kid, Heero."
"A kid who was somewhere he had no place being! A kid, awake at midnight and in one of the enemies computer rooms! And YOU just let him walk away!" Cobalt eyes were now flashing with anger, and Quatre just knew it was because he was thinking about what he'd have to write in his report tonight.
By then, Wufei just had to interject his own thoughts in the matter. "At the very least, you could have knocked him out, Winner, and left him there. He would have been fine and then none of this would have happened."
"I'm sorry! I didn't think of that at the time, he was upset and I just wanted to calm him down! I let him go, I messed up and I know it! I'm sorry you guys got hurt and maybe I would handle it different if I had another chance, but I don't regret letting him live even if he did cause us getting caught."
Heero only heard the first part of Quatre's sharp response, that apology. He stood up and reached for the gun on his back, pulling it out and lifting it to the blonde's face to make good on his earlier statement only to find Duo suddenly back and standing between him, the med kit held to his chest like some freakish teddy bear.
"Put that damned thing away, Heero. Right now. He didn't kill the kid, I couldn't have either. He just didn't make the right choice and I think that's pretty understandable considering what was going on at the time. He is sorry, and although that doesn't make up for what happened and he knows it, shooting him isn't going to do any good either. It'll just be another piece of crap that happened tonight that you'll have to explain. So put that thing back in your pants." Looking over his shoulder to Quatre, Duo's face was pale other then two upset patches of red high on his cheeks. He was being forced to come between his boyfriend and his best friend, and it was straining him. "And Quatre, just go to your room, okay? Get in there and let us clean this thing up."
"But Duo, I can-"
"Quatre, bug off. Please?"
It was how tired Duo sounded that forced him to agree. He stared at his friend until Duo's form started to shimmer like a mirage from the tears he couldn't hold back, then rose jerkily from the chair and stumbled his way down the hall. As he was walking away he heard Heero's soft comment 'you should have let me shoot him' like something from a bad dream.
-----
Sleep took a long time to overtake him. He had entered the room he shared with Trowa, (the small, already furnished apartment in the nowhere town they were using as a safe house only had three bedrooms, and after Duo and Heero had claimed one for themselves and their rambunctious activities, Wufei in one and he and Trowa in the other had seemed the most reasonable arrangement) and moved to flop onto on side of the lumpy bed. There was only one of them in here, some huge thing that looked fifty years old, but with how small he was and how thin Trowa was, it wasn't much a problem.
With one hand tucked behind his head and the other thrown carelessly over his flat midsection, Quatre had lain there for about an hour. His tears had dried up as soon as he'd come in here; despite his emotional state, he just couldn't see the point to them and didn't have the energy for it. He lay and listened to the rise and fall of his teams' voices in the living room, the anger in Heero's like a dull blade in his mind, Duo's exhausted attempts at peacemaking icing on a very bitter cake.
He barely heard Trowa, just a loud sound and then a pained gasp that he thought could have been his green eyed friend, and oh how that made his heart break. Wufei's voice was just a soft presence behind Duo and Heero's, and it was while he was trying to focus on his distant words that he finally drifted off into a troubled sleep.
An hour later the door open and with bleary eyes, he watched Trowa make his limping way over to the bed. The light of the moon through the thin gauze of old lace curtains illuminated the tallest of the pilots while he struggled through removing his shirt. Quatre didn't want to embarrass Trowa by watching, or to let him know he was awake and be forced into conversation by rolling onto his other side to give Trowa the privacy he deserved. But he did close his eyes as the edge of that green turtle neck was finally lifted from a muscular midsection and started inching upwards.
His decision was made for him when he heard it drop to the floor in a hiss of fabric and then heard the tired grunt from Trowa as he started trying to handle his pants. He knew that his friend was in for a lot of effort with that task, since the pant leg had been torn to allow Wufei to treat him and he wasn't going to be able to slide them down without some help. Quatre sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, glancing up at the green eyed boy in silence explanation as he reached for the fastens on Trowa's jeans.
After a moment where Trowa froze like a statue, the 'it's Quatre' truth clicked in his mind and he allowed his hands to fall away. Just turned his head to the side, permission for Quatre's help given without an uttered word on it. But he did have something to say and within the safety of his room with Quatre, he felt securing in doing so. "Heero shouldn't have said that. Or pulled his gun."
"I know…" He started carefully pulling the waist of Trowa's pants down, using one hand to lightly hold the hem of what proved to be dark green boxers so they wouldn't come as well. He knew there was more to come. After forming a strange and comfortable friendship with the quiet pilot of Heavyarms, he'd come to understand certain things about the other boy.
"But he's right about the boy. You acted foolishly. We could have all been killed."
He winced and bit back on the apology building in his throat, lowering his head as he took one of Trowa's hands and braced it on his shoulder so that the taller boy could free his uninjured leg without too much trouble or pain. "I know."
"We failed the mission, and that's one thing Heero's really mad about. And this is the first one he's been on since he and Duo started dating. I think it scared him to have to think of Duo getting hurt, whether he'll admit it to himself or not. That's why he's so mad with you. Not the report, or even the data."
Again came that soft and tragically unhappy response. "I know, Trowa."
Trowa looked down at the blonde as he shifted out of his pants, then sat awkwardly on the bed to start working on the real task. Getting the skin tight jeans he insisted on wearing off around the bulky brace holding his leg together. Once he was settled, he reached a long hand out to tip Quatre's face up and give him one of those rare smiles that usually forced Quatre to return it. "We're alive though… You made a mistake, but we are all going to live, and I know you won't make it again. He'll realize that tomorrow and things will cool down."
Today Quatre's face remained pinched in worry when he did that though, and the best Trowa got for his effort was a slight slackening in the frown that dominated full pink lips. The blonde sank down and muttered a 'sorry' as he tore Trowa's jeans further, and then pulled the offending material away. That sad expression, even after what had happened tonight, bothered Trowa… But for right now he was just too tired to think on it or try to get rid of it. He thanked Quatre, then fell back on the flat pillows at the head of the bed.
From within a soft cloud of exhaustion, he felt the small pilot tuck him in under the thin blankets, and then that telltale shift of the bed as Quatre himself crawled in and wiggled around into a comfortable position beside him. He'd shared rooms with him enough to know almost all of the blonde's quirks, and knew that Quatre was probably going to be tossing and turning all night from just those few signs. Maybe even with those nightmares he occasionally woke Trowa up with by flailing and never wanted to talk about.
However, if he did any of those things, Trowa never felt it. He dozed off within seconds and didn't wake until the healthy hour of eight the next morning when his leg started to sing with sharp pain. After going back to sleep failed as an option, he decided to see if Quatre was up, to ask him if he could please get some of the painkillers they carried in the kit and bring them to the room if it wasn't too much hassle since he refused to spend the day bedridden.
Rolling over onto his side with a low groan, he reached to touch Quatre's shoulder, and when he did, he saw that the blonde was already gone.
He'd been wrong about things cooling down.
