LSC / 01-07-12
(Fly on Broken Wings - Chapter Fifty-Four: Spoken)
rated: R - language, content, violence
shounen-ai/yaoi

CHAPTER 54

Spoken


The whole time he was gone, Trowa worried. He pulled a movie off the new release shelf at random and visibly annoyed the clerk with his silence; they usually assumed he was just being rude, and in this case Trowa supposed that was true. He tapped an impatient rhythm against the steering wheel at the first red light and the next. They were all red, conspiring against him no doubt, delaying his ability to get back to the apartment and postpone the inevitable.

When he returned, Trowa found the bedroom empty. Sandy stared back at him from the bed, the bear almost hidden behind a pillow. Trowa went back out into the living room and then followed the soft sound of conversation with no small amount of dread, but the dark worry cluttering up his thoughts cleared when he heard Catherine laugh. That had to be a good sign. Trowa pushed open the kitchen door.

A great cloud of steam rose up out of the sink as Catherine drained the spaghetti noodles. "Hi, you're back!" she said cheerfully over her shoulder to Trowa.

Quatre was leaned up against the stove and lazily stirring a simmering sauce pan. He tilted his attention toward Trowa and gave the barest shake of his head, whatever that meant. All Trowa cared about were his eyes, those twin pools of aquamarine that looked perfectly normal in the bright kitchen light. Trowa spotted his can of soda, opened and abandoned on the counter, and he grabbed it out from behind Quatre before it could accidentally spill.

Catherine ran cold water over the colander full of noodles. "What does your dad do, that he's overseas?" She asked Quatre, apparently picking up whatever conversation tangent they'd been having before Trowa interrupted.

"He runs the company," Quatre said. "Winner Consolidated Energy?"

"Oh!" said Catherine. She set the colander across the rim of the pot to catch the excess drips. "I've seen that office building downtown. The tall one with the big W, right?"

"Yeah, that's the one." High spots of color bloomed across Quatre's face, the only outward betrayal of his sudden discomfort. Trowa felt absurdly like he was eavesdropping and couldn't fail to note the resolute way Quatre kept his eyes on his task. Trowa thought perhaps Quatre would lie, when questioned like this, but from the boy's discomfort Trowa felt certain that was not the case.

"What about your mom? What does she do?" Catherine set aside the noodles and turned to take the wooden spoon from Quatre. He relinquished it and took a step back, letting her have reign over the stove once more.

"Nothing," said Quatre. He made a sudden motion, as if shift something out from under his arm; Trowa thought at once of Sandy, lying across the bed just a few rooms away, and recognized the empty, grasping gesture. Quatre clenched his hand into a fist and dropped it to his side. "I don't have one. She died."

"Oh," said Catherine. She gave him a startled, guilty look. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

"It's fine," Quatre said quickly. It was a lie, Trowa knew it was a lie, but meant so sweetly and genuinely that it made Catherine smile nonetheless.

"But who are you staying with now, if your dad's away?"

"By myself." Quatre said it simply, so ingenuously, that Trowa understood at once why he'd indulged Catherine's questions with the truth.

"Really? You poor thing." She clicked off the stove. From the corner of her eye she watched Quatre, taking in the dusty shadows under his eyes, the loose way his clothes fell over his thin body, and the cautious way he held himself.

Trowa tried to see these things as she might, absent of knowledge regarding the withdrawal symptoms, the cold and bleak hospital, all those little worried that roamed within Quatre and made him look so fragile and strong all at the same time. Trowa tried, but failed, to see Quatre as a stranger would.

"Excuse us for a second, Quatre. Can you get the bread out of the oven? Pot holders are just there next to you, top drawer."

"Sure," he said. Catherine beckoned Trowa to follow her out of the kitchen. Quatre and Trowa locked eyes for a second, silently swapping worry and reassurance in mutual understanding of the sudden gamble they were taking.

Catherine led him into the hall, where the whirling sound of the dryer threatened to drown out her quiet words. She said only his name before her eyes caught on the folded bundle of sheets sitting on top of the dryer, right where Trowa had left them.

"Looks like you're two steps ahead of me," she said. He couldn't read her tone, but he knew he didn't like it. Catherine fluffed her hair back from her shoulders and looked up at him for a moment, her eyes blue and clear and more than a little melancholic.

"If Quatre wants to stay here tonight, that's fine with me, but I wish you would have," she hesitated, so clearly about to have said something like I wish you would have told me. She took a breath to settle herself and tried again. "I wish you would have let me know. You're almost eighteen, I know that you're almost all grown up, but you're my little brother. We're all we have, you know? I'm responsible for you."

Trowa shuffled his hands into his pockets and stared at the carpet before her earnest gaze unnerved him. He wanted to say something to her, something like, you don't need to take care of me, or even just a contrite and humble, thank you for taking care of me. But he couldn't do that; he couldn't even look at her.

"I'm glad you have a friend," she said kindly. "And it's good of you to want to help him like this." She tipped forward and graced a light kiss on his cheek. He'd been taller than her for a few years now, but only recently did the age difference between them seem so small. When he'd been fourteen and all alone, and Catherine eighteen and suddenly his legal guardian thanks to his mother's propensity for vodka and dislike of seat belts, she'd seemed an impossibly wise and imposing adult.

Now he, being that old himself, he understood nothing as to how she'd managed to seem so collect, so in control and mature with the circumstances. Her actions mystified him. Her patience, her understanding, the infallibly bright and optimistic way she handled his silence and misery and hospitalizations - all of it confused and overwhelmed Trowa, and he felt a terribly stinging guilt for deceiving her like this. She deserved the truth, and she deserved to hear him tell her; not some stupid gesture or an empty nod, but actual words, in the voice he'd hidden from her for so long.

Sorrow and terror in equal parts clogged his throat and refused to let any sound past. Trowa swallowed sandpaper and felt a blind, drowning dampness threaten his composure. He managed a single, small jerk of his head.

"Come on," she said. "Dinner's almost ready. We'll just have to figure out something about tomorrow. You have your doctor's appointment, remember? I planned on us both going there straight from work... I guess you could drop me off instead... Well, it's nothing we can't work out."

Catherine set Trowa to helping Quatre in the kitchen while she rearranged some furniture to create three place settings. They lacked a dining room, or even a dining room table, and took their meals on the couch normally. Catherine expressed little interest in fully furnishing the apartment, which had a bare and empty look due to her scant decorating. Trowa always wondered if she operated under a Spartan sense of minimalism or if Catherine considered this apartment temporary, and if she did, was that showing optimism, that Trowa and her could move somewhere else, maybe that she could even go back to school, or was that a rare glimpse of pessimism, that she expected Trowa to ultimately end up in a different hospital, one that catered to adults instead of children, so she'd have to move again to keep close.

His best streak had been the entire time between thirteen, when everyone assumed he'd accidentally fallen from the roof, and fifteen, when it'd been pretty hard to find an excuse for the half-bottle of pills they'd pumped out of his stomach. Or maybe he should count that as between eight, when he stopped talking and had been sent through a gauntlet of child psychiatrists, and fifteen, since no one had questioned his sanity after his fall. Except his mother, who thanked him for the effort but recommended a taller building next time, and then smiled sweetly and said, as always, don't tell anyone I said that.


Trowa woke slowly, drifting up out of a forgotten dream and into confusion. Pale moonlight, barely strong enough to create dark shadows, meant nothing to him in regards to whether or not he was supposed to be awake; working breakfast shift often meant he was up and out of bed by four, when not even the deep purple of the earliest sunrises was visible.

"Trowa? Are you awake?" The whisper came drifting up from the floor. Trowa rolled on to his side and dipped a hand to the low trundle in answer, brushing across the bare skin of Quatre's arm. A rustle of fabric accompanied the pop and groan of the mattress, and then a vaguely Quatre-shaped shadow appeared into view.

"I can't sleep," he said. His voice soft, tense, and all together strange. It sent a thrill of some unknown anticipation through Trowa. Maybe this was the dream, and he'd awake in a few minutes in a different dark room, alone and quickly forgetting why he shouldn't be.

And then Quatre was sliding between the sheets and into the narrow little bed, and Trowa had to scoot back against the wall to make room. Their legs tangled together in a comfortable fight for space that ended with Quatre fit close up against him. "You're warm," Quatre said. His breath pooled into the hollow of Trowa's neck.

Were you cold? Trowa rubbed a hand up the length of Quatre's arm, feeling gooseflesh along the way. Catherine loved her air-conditioning, perhaps a little too much at times. Quatre nuzzled against him, his hair brushing Trowa's cheek with the motion.

No matter how warm Quatre claimed he felt, no matter how much Quatre seemed to heat under his touch, Trowa felt frozen from the first moment Quatre's lips found his. He held still under the boy's affections, holding on to so much tense caution that it was Quatre who finally asked, "What's wrong?"

But Trowa could no sooner whisper than yell, even though he knew Catherine had to be asleep.

"It's okay," Quatre said. Something in the way he said it made that the reassurance extended beyond Quatre's own concern and into Trowa's silence. He shifted against Trowa. "I'm not anxious now."

Trowa gripped a hand to Quatre's hip and pulled him even closer, the gesture both a question and an answer of his own. Quatre let out a startled gasp against Trowa's lips before pressing to him with a silent, enthusiastic agreement. It started slow, just the soft, exploratory motions that Quatre made against him in the dark, as if finding the limits of where his body ended and where Trowa's began. They were both quiet, for much the same reason. Each muffled and muted sound that Quatre made was an assault on Trowa's resolute self-control, until finally it broke apart and left him desperate for more. More touch, more heat, more of Quatre, all that he could reach and possess and consume with his furious desire. Clothes became an obstacle to be removed, the blankets a hopeless jumble, and their own warmth more than enough to make up for the lack.

Trowa bit lightly at Quatre's neck, the delicate skin equal parts sweet and salty. He worked his lips directly into that soft, sensitive little crook just behind the ear, right where it made Quatre's breath catch. "I love you." He mouthed the words, their sound hardly more than silence, but Quatre gasped, and Trowa knew he'd heard.

After that, no other words were necessary.


(Author's Notes)

A new reader! Hooray! Welcome, thank you, I'm blushing from all the fangirling. And, old readers (Jazzy, Amy, Snowdragon, all the rest!), thanks for your continued support!

This chapter ended up being difficult to write. Sorry this one ended up being short-ish. I'll get started on the next one right away! This chapter (and the previous one) deals with a writing problem I'd nicknamed "The Catherine Knot," so thanks to May for helping resolve it with a solution that didn't involve cutting her in half. (Historians aren't very good comedians, but we try…)

Incidentally I was concerned that people might not have caught a subtle cameo appearance in chapter 51, Zechs's last chapter? I worry about stuff like that. I'll work harder as a writer to make things more clear in the future!

copyright 2012 - Gundam Wing & Co. (c) Sotsu/Sunrise
LSC - Violet Nyte