Title: Just a Little Too Neat
Fandom: Wheel of Time
Characters: Mat/Tuon
Prompt: 043 - Square
Word Count: 758
Rating: PG (what did I say about this?)
Author's Notes: What should I say here? I dunno, really. Go…do something. Or review. Or something. Or bother me into writing the next chapter of the Owner's Manual and Guide. Never mind. The fic:

Tuon didn't like boys.

It was just a fact of life. She'd never liked them. They were, in a simplistic sort of way, inexplicably impossible to understand. And besides, they never listened, and rarely followed simple directives when they did. They bothered her. Of course, they were a good half of the court, so she couldn't avoid them. She settled for ignoring them, and cataloguing them.

Tuon was good at cataloguing things. She organized her bookshelves, lined up her shoes in neat little rows in her closet, and made lists of nearly everything. Lists helped her organize things, make order out of chaos. That was one thing that Tuon could not stand at all. Chaos. It bothered her more than boys – seeing them out of line, out of symmetry, disorganized. It went against her basic principles.

Servants learned to keep all quarters clean. Tuon was notorious for sweeping imperiously through the hallways without warning and, if an area was not clean to her satisfaction, taking a broom and dustpan in hand herself, and cleaning it. It didn't bother Tuon much, but it did bother her mother. Besides, Tuon had a way of looking at you when she was unhappy that just made you want to beg on your knees for forgiveness. A mixture of hurt and disappointment. She seemed to take these things personally – a lack of cleanliness the enemy, the mop her ally.

So it was only natural when she began fitting males into their own neat little boxes, finding a little niche for them to fit comfortably in, and cataloguing them into her analytical brain so they were safely contained. That one was the Loud Man, the one who talked all the time, and that one over there was the Flirt – he owned the hearts of every lady who had eyes. She mocked them, laughed at them, and swept through life entirely superior to their antics. When Tuon wanted to ignore something, she ignored it.

But that was before him. Before he strolled into her life, bursting through a closed door, rumpled and dirty and representing everything she hated. Chaos. Chaos was Matrim Cauthon. First, she classified him as the Rogue. Naughty, dangerous, dirty. Not someone to get involved with. Not that she was interested. He was male, after all – and most males were purely obnoxious. There were exceptions, of course. But they were, admittedly, rare. But before the end of their first meeting, she had to reclassify him again. She didn't like taking someone out of their box once they were there. It felt…unsafe.

She gave him a name, to help her fit him into her neat little catalogue of men. Toy. He would be Toy. That was easy, and him. A Buffoon, not all that intelligent, not really worthy of her respect. A Toy, in short.

But he kept stretching the boundaries she had put on him. Breaking boundaries, staying uncomfortably just ahead of her classifying him. It was just not fair. It made her angry. It made her frightened. She didn't like not being able to keep him catalogued. She waded through his dirty room, searching for clues to this mysterious man, resisting the urge to tidy the bed, pick up the filthy clothes. It was not her business how this man chose to keep his space. But it was hard.

She found nothing, and was left with a vague sense of dissatisfaction after speaking directly to him for the first time.

There was the damane kennels, and then his escape – and suddenly, he was moving too fast for her to keep up. He was a fool, a leader, a player of Stones, a flirt, clever, foxlike. Too many facets for one man. There had never been someone she could not catalogue. She had to keep him in a box, or he would sweep her off her feet and she would not be able to regain them.

He surfaced all sorts of uncomfortable desires, and feelings that she did not want to have. She wanted control back. Or part of her did.

But another part was already deciding that chaos in the form of Matrim Cauthon would not be so bad after all.