Heero
Little One's behavior got steadily more and more worrying to me over the next few days.
I stopped initiating sex - mostly just to see what would happen, and because I was worried that the last time had spooked him. I don't think he even noticed. We had just as much sex without me starting it.
It almost seemed to me as if he were counting it. Twice or three times a day was what seemed to be the thing. If we'd only done it once, and it reached afternoon, there he'd be on top of me. Either he felt like there was a quota he had to reach, or he didn't know any other way to be. I did notice that he spent a very long time with me afterward, usually with me inside of him, pressed up close to me and asking me to stay. That seemed to be our version of a hug. I wondered if he knew that he could get those without having sex.
I feared speaking to him about it - like I feared speaking to him about everything, but progressively he got more and more worrying to me. He started staring out the window, looking at who knew what, and he would flinch and sometimes yelp when I made my presence known to him. Always, he would smile and we'd go straight back into what I was beginning to understand was 'Our Little Lie'.
Our entire relationship was a sham and we both seemed to know it. We were both lying by omission, and that was what our relationship was founded on. I didn't tell him anything important. He didn't ask. He didn't tell me anything important. I didn't ask.
It had worked well at first. The first few days had been seemingly perfect, but as they ebbed away and I got used to him interacting with me and speaking to me, I realized that they hadn't been perfect. As he calmed down, it brought to attention how completely manic he was.
As he settled down and relaxed in my home, and began to slowly understand that I would still be there with him the next morning, he began the transition away from crazy, and I realized exactly how bad things were. His eyes had been too wide, the whites showing too extremely all the time. He was getting better, or at least, more balanced, but it only served to worry me.
He had gone from one extreme to the next, from screaming and hate to moaning and love, and if I was honest with myself I wanted him to stay on the latter side of madness, if he had to be there at all. I wasn't sure I even wanted him to find a happy middle - if he did, then I would be stuck with him hating me a bit more and loving me a bit less.
We were having too much sex, though I was loathe to admit it. He was showing signs of exhaustion, and we stopped his writing lessons so that he would sleep all day, and wake up only to eat and fuck. I didn't know how to fix it. Part of me didn't want to. Part of me wanted him to just stop and talk to me. Or kiss me. He had stopped kissing me on the mouth, turning his head to the side and latching on to my ear or my neck. The one time I tried to press it, and tried to make him turn his head to me, he ended up putting himself on all fours and wriggling his ass at me. He clearly didn't want to talk to me about it, but I could take a hint. I took him from behind, flipped him over halfway through, and gave him my neck again as a peace offering. He took it, and bit me really hard. I liked to assume that meant he wasn't mad, though after that he started finding it hard to even look at me, unless I was very very close to him.
A day after Relena had spoken to him, she had reappeared personally at my door with two glass bottles of who knew what. "They charged you," she warned me, and I just shrugged. "If he doesn't drink them, force him," she said sternly, shocking me a little bit with that kind of insistence. Usually Relena was the first to offer compromises.
I brought them to him. He was sleepy and sluggish, but he drank quietly. He made the request of spacing them out, as he still couldn't eat much at once, to which I obliged, and he drank the next one an hour later without prompting. Then he slept again, then I woke up from a trance inside his mouth.
This was normal. If I managed to fall asleep, that tended to be one of the more common ways I would wake up. I most certainly wasn't complaining, after all, if Trowa slept while Quatre wasn't shackled up, he would likely wake up to a murder attempt. I felt like I had gotten the better deal.
Unfortunately, I didn't know if I could keep up. Unlike him, I wasn't sleeping all day. I was trancing while he slept, then again at night while he slept, and I was exhausted.
When we did talk, it was mostly simple. Only once did we ever touch on the subject of Geordi Raven, the man I had come to regard as the devil himself, and when we did I almost wished we hadn't.
"I don't blame him. He was an old man whose mother never taught him right from wrong. Besides, there are far worse things you can do to a person than just lock them up and force them. Far worse."
I hated the concept that he didn't hate Geordi almost as much as I hated the concept that he knew of worse things than being locked up in a cellar and raped. He gave me a weird look then, looking me up and down, then he continued, and again I wished he hadn't.
"At the abbey, we took in a slave girl who'd been made to fall in love with her master. He forced her, but made her like it, and then convinced her that she wanted it. It kept on long enough that she fell in love with him. She was so far gone we couldn't stop her from killing herself. She thought it was what he would have wanted. Geordi never did that to me."
After that, we barely spoke of anything. We mastered the art of weather talk - which consisted of me telling him how many clouds there were out the window, or him talking about how loud the rain on the roof had been last night.
Sometimes he would stroke my chest and put his head on my shoulder, telling me how much he loved me. When I lay down to rest, he would curl right up beside me, and nibble on my earlobe between telling me he loved me.
I never wanted it to stop, I never wanted it to change, but it did, after a whole week, and I didn't even know why. One moment he was in my arms, groaning at my fingers in him, then I put my lips to his neck, then all hell broke loose and he clamped down on me with muscles I didn't even know existed in there. He jerked away from me, and it must have hurt him, because he didn't ease off, he ripped himself off, with enough force that he fell off the bed. When I crawled down next to him he was shaking and actually not breathing, his eyes back in that extremely wide state. It took an hour to calm him down and even longer to get him to even talk to me. The only thing he said was "Sorry," and then he crawled into bed and wept into my blue blanket.
When I went to bed that night he didn't roll over to face me and demand a neck to bite on, nor did he even look at me when I tucked him in. As I was about to fall into a trance, as I knew that sleeping was not even an option after that, he asked me in the most pitiful of voices: "Be here when I wake up?"
I leaned in to kiss him on the forehead again. "Always," I assured him, hoping it was what he wanted to hear.
He had nightmares all night. At one point, my stomach dropped, and I nearly threw up, when I heard him calling out quietly: "Geordi ... help me ..."
I couldn't stay lying down after that, and I went to get a drink. I figured I damn well deserved it. Trowa happened to be awake at the time, and I spoke to him about it, while we both drank bad ale in large amounts. Trowa didn't say much while I blurted everything to him, and afterward I felt awful, considering what I'd been failing to do to save Quatre, and by proxy, failing to do to save him.
After a while he just nodded, skulled his ale, and said, "It sounds to me like the last thing you should be doing is trancing. Stop trying. It isn't helping. And I won't think any less of you."
Before I went back to bed, I stopped on the stairs. "Don't do anything stupid. You still have a dream to have with Quatre."
I pretended not to hear his reply as I went back into my room. I pretended not to feel the guilt and the horror at what was happening. I pretended I wasn't crying onto Little One's sleeping back.
After I wrested control of myself, I vowed to find Quatre. Because if I let that dream come to pass without any solid clues to save him, or if I didn't get him back before he told Trowa to do it, then I'd never forgive myself.
Because as I'd walked up those stairs into my room, I heard my best friend commit to his own death.
'That's all I'm waiting for,' he had said quietly.
Primary Mission redacted.
Primary Mission: Fix Little One and get Quatre back.
