There was no such thing as happily ever after. It was a fact Duo learned long ago, years before he first heard the lines read to him from a dusty old book Sister Helen had owned. The book spoke of beautiful maidens rescued from perilous situations, their saviours handsome and stronger than life. The women would fall in love and marry their rescuers, and they would live 'Happily Ever After.'
A fantasy that could not exist in reality.
So he hadn't expected a miracle when he drove Trowa back to the city, to the house he had not been able to make a home. The boxes had been unpacked the day after he first moved in, a place being found for the few possessions he owned in this world. Furniture had been bought and arranged, paint had been applied liberally to the walls, and the yard had been tackled and tamed to look something less like a jungle and more like the ones on either side of him.
But it was not home. Not without Trowa.
As he expected, the moment Trowa saw the dishes left in the sink he immediately moved to clean them and put them away, which led to him washing down the surfaces of the counters, mopping the floors, and taking out the trash to the bins outside. His demeanor for the rest of the evening was calm and collected, and Duo showed him the rest of the house, which room was set aside and untouched for Trowa. He left him to his own devices after that, retreating to his room and curling up in his blanket.
He was happy and terrified to be with Trowa again, even though it was all that had been on his mind since the day Trowa sent him away.
That's not what happened, he reminded himself angrily. He had a year to get over this resentment, this pain, but it was harder when he was living with the source. The elated feeling of 'I have Trowa back!' was easy enough to understand; he had only been counting down the days until he gained his own freedom, and then talked himself into going and securing Trowa's. The 'Who will stop him from killing me if he loses his temper?' feeling was harder to ignore, harder to suppress and block from his conscious mind. It wasn't fair; he could defend himself, and he was here to help Trowa not fall prey to those urges anymore. But things were easier said than done.
There ain't no happily ever after, remember?
He hadn't expected Trowa to come to bed with him, not after so many months apart, so when he fell asleep alone and woke up the same way, he wasn't disappointed or resentful. It took three weeks before the air between them wasn't thick with tension, three weeks before Duo finally snapped and screamed his frustration with Trowa, his pain and anger releasing on the tide of a sharp tongue.
"Why did you make me leave?!" he screamed, his hand throbbing in time with his racing heart. There was a slight dent in the table from where his fist had connected, the flesh reddening and swelling the longer he ignored it. Trowa, to his credit, just sat there silently as he raged, his expression never flickering from the neutral, bored air he had come to dinner with.
"All I wanted was to stay with you! And you pushed me away! Do you know how much that hurt me? How many times I wondered what I did wrong, what I had done to make you no longer want to see me?!"
"It wasn't about that," Trowa replied coolly, the icy words belaying his serene expression. "I hold no resentment or bitterness towards you."
"Then why, god damn it?!"
"Because you had a chance to get the hell out of that prison. I made sure you were going to take it."
Duo just stared at him, disbelief rising in his chest followed by a swell of fury.
"Do I mean so little to you?" Duo asked, his voice deathly quiet. It was a stark contrast to the torrent of emotions brewing inside of him. Trowa gave a small, self-deprecating smile.
"You are the only reason I held on so long. Don't belittle your worth. I have none to spare myself."
"Oh, Tro'," Duo murmured, stepping around the table to wrap his arms around the taller teen. "You're worth ten of me."
Trowa didn't reply, but he didn't push Duo away either. They shared a bed that night.
"Would you get a job if you could right now?" Duo asked one day, draped across the sofa and watching Trowa working on… something. It had a lot of wires, and looked like a mere pile of wires, but it most likely wasn't as innocent as it seemed.
Duo didn't ask though, figuring he could claim ignorance if worse came to worse.
Trowa merely shook his head, pulling one of the many wires tight and switching the wire strippers he held in his hand for the roll of electrical tape he had clutched between his teeth. He deftly wrapped the single exposed wire in a plastic coat of blue, before starting to group some of the other wires together and binding them as well. It looked complicated, orderly, and suspicious as all fuck, but Duo kept chanting to himself 'plausible deniability, plausible deniability.' For all he knew, Trowa could be making a very blue, eccentric representation of a tree without leaves. Maybe. If he stretched his imagination enough.
Oh, who was he kidding?
"If I could, I'd work with kids," Duo said, as if Trowa hadn't tried to shoot down the conversation. "Troubled ones, not the snotty, privileged kids. I want the ones that the rest of the world's written off as a lost cause, the ones not expected to make it anywhere in life."
They both fell silent after that, the thought shared between them not needing to be repeated aloud. There would be no chance for Duo to ever have the opportunity. They wouldn't let a former terrorist or convicted criminal near any children who could be heading down those same roads. 'No need to encourage them' would be the general thought for anyone else who heard.
They remained in silence the rest of the evening.
Duo wasn't ashamed of running. It was something he was known for (and damn good at too) and not afraid to use to his advantage. Even if it meant running from his irate housemate. Who had decked him in the face and possibly broken his nose. He hadn't stopped to patch it up, or to stem the bleeding.
No, he had wasted no time in fleeing to the attic space, curled up in a ball, and had no plans on leaving there any time soon.
It wasn't like it had been unexpected; Trowa had threatened to hurt him several times since they'd met, but only once before had a punch been thrown and met its intended target. That one other time had been a ruse though, a means to pass along information that they desperately needed while Trowa was hiding among the enemy ranks.
This time… there was no noble cause. It was fully intended to cause pain. It was what Trowa had wanted as the end result.
That thought hurt more than the injury itself.
It was quite some time before Duo felt calm enough to slide out of the attic, change his ruined clothes, assess his injury (snapped, will need to be reset soon), and decide what he wanted to do next. He should seek out Trowa, but he wasn't confident that Trowa wanted to see him yet.
That never stopped Duo from doing what he felt like, and so with trepidation churning in his gut, he sought out the other man.