Toy Soldiers: Interlude

This didn't really fit anywhere else, but Treize and Wufei's relationship really did rate a little more exploration, since it's such a focal point for so many things that happen in the story. This slides neatly in between books I and II, after Duo has escaped from Fortress Barge and let the others know he's all right.

It is a lemon. Like most of my serious lemons it's mostly psychological, but there are still graphic depictions of yaoi sex, so if the thought of Treize and Wufei going at it turns your stomach, you might want to give it a pass...or just read the first couple pages and stop when things start getting heavy, because the beginning is pretty much just Wufei contemplating things. I mean, I'd like it if you gave it a try, of course, but I don't want to disturb anybody! And if you like lemon, well, here, it's my first ever 13x5, have fun!

Ash

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Toy Soldiers: Interlude

Inferno Rosa

by Ashura Nagisa

standard disclaimers apply

archive: Desolation Angels (http://www.dreamwater.net/ashura)

pairings: 13x5

warnings: POV yaoi lemon

notes: since Yahoo doesn't always show italics, I want to clarify that when Treize says 'dragon,' even as a single word instead of the longer 'mon petit dragon,' he's speaking French and it should be pronounced as such.

*****

"You promised."

I meant to be defiant, accusing, but I know I only sounded tired. Treize nodded--regretfully, I thought--and sank onto the edge of the bed. He looked weary, threadworn--it was one of those rare moments when I realised my lover was really only a man.

I didn't want a man. I wanted a god. Treize had beaten me at so many games, and my pride demanded that he be more than human. The victor of my body and champion of my hard-won heart must not be as mortal as I.

"I did," he agreed softly, and I realised I had almost forgotten my charge against him, lost as I was in my own thoughts. "I never meant to break my promise to you, mon petit dragon, and I have remedied it as best I can."

I wanted to tell him it wasn't enough--that /he/ wasn't enough. I wanted, as I had so many times before, to call an end to this bizarre affair and restore our relationship to something that made sense. But I didn't, couldn't, just as I never could, because some part of me knew this was the /only/ thing that made sense. I understood him, and it bound me to him. In the end I was really no more than Treize's Wufei.

//And is he then...My Treize?// I tried out the words in my mind, but they tasted strange. I am not the sort for romantic turns of phrase, and while his public facade may have seemed otherwise, neither was he. We were lovers, true, but we were not lisping effeminates drowning each other in affection. He made me strong. He helped me clear my head and determine my own path...and he distracted me, when all I could hear in my head was Nataku's incessant demand for revenge.

And he reminded me that all men, even my enemies, have it in them to be honourable.

He looked at me expectantly, and I realised how long I must have been standing there staring at him.

"I asked," he said gently, as if he knew he were interrupting my thoughts, "after the health of pilot 02."

I swallowed. "He's all right," I conceded. It was true. I had not seen Duo in person in a long time, but his transmissions were always optimistic, and he had assured me he was recovering from the Oz soldiers' ill treatment of him.

Treize nodded. "You are angry," he observed quietly. I winced at the hurt in his voice. I never understood this power I had to wound him; maybe it was because I had so much trouble believing he had real feelings for me.

But why should that be so? Surely he risked as much as I did--even more, for he was a leader of so many devoted souls and I had only Nataku to answer to. Logic told me he must care for me, or he would have taken me once in victory and discarded me.

But he had not. It was my own insecurity that made me doubt him, for he had never given me reason to. To believe I was only a bedmate to him was ludicrous--I, an unpracticed boy whose sexual experience had been limited to the single unwilling consummation of a childhood wedding, I his sworn enemy who, had I been possessed of less honour and more sense, would have ended his life while he slept and taken my own victory. He had never treated me as less than an equal, no matter how inferior I felt. We talked more than we made love. We did not discuss the war we were fighting; it was part of our agreement to keep our soldier-selves separate from the secret life we led. That agreement had included his promise, to disallow the torture and mistreatment of any of us pilots Oz captured.

It had not been a hard thing for him to agree to. He did not want to hurt us--truly, I think he did not ever want to harm anyone. We would not have been foes at all, but for our differing ideas on how peace was to be attained, and who would control it afterward.

So we talked instead of intellectual things--literature, philosophy, the history of man and how it might come into play again--conversations such as I had not had since my youth as a would-be scholar. Treize understood my hunger for knowledge as Meiran--Nataku--never had, and what he had of it he fed me indulgently.

He was older than Meiran had been, though, and wiser--there was no reason for me to ever find a connection between them. Still, there were times when I couldn't help thinking that Treize would have understood giving one's life to defend a bed of flowers.

He was just more ambitious. To Treize, all the earth was a flowerbed, or perhaps a rose garden.

But I had been lost again. "Mon petit dragon...Wufei...tell me what you are thinking." 'Little dragon,' he called me, and perhaps I should have been insulted, but from his lips the words were a caress. /His/ dragon...because I was his, as I had never been anyone's.

"I am angry," I told him, but I knew as I spoke them that the words were untrue. So I corrected them, standing stiff and still before him, his shoulders slumped as he perched wearily on the edge of the bed.

"You were weak," I continued, and I thought I saw a twitch at the corner of his lips. It was a word I had a tendency to overuse. "You failed to control your soldiers."

"And I have compensated for it," he reminded me. "Your friend is free and recovering; those responsible for his treatment have been punished. Even you, dragon, must consider that justice has been done?"

"But if you are weak," I blurted suddenly, "what does that make me?" There it was, the heart and soul of all my fears.

Treize caught my hand and drew me, unresisting, close. "Wufei," he said softly, his voice tender, his breath warming my skin, "no man is infallible. Being strong does not mean never making a mistake; it does not mean winning every fight. Sometimes strength lies only in the willingness to admit a failure and remedy it."

I did not know if I believed him. Still I let him lead me, allowing myself to be comforted by his acceptance of imperfection. In the main at least he was correct, it would do me no good to cling to an anger I did not wish to feel. Blaming him would make nothing more right than he had already done.

And I believed then, as I still do, that whatever else might be said of him, Treize was a good-hearted man.

His fingers stroked tenderly through my hair, loosing it to fall around my face, and he pressed his cheek into it. A soft exhalation of his breath tickled my ear, a sigh of profound weariness that bordered on despair. Another revelation--it had not occurred to me before that moment that his heart and mind might be as weighted with troubles as my own. I was being selfish--but I was also being young, and he knew that and forgave it in me.

My heart beat faster in my chest, pulsing in my temples as I folded him in my arms, taller than he only because I was still standing. When I had been the one to lose the duel between us, he became to me the stronger, the Alpha in our pack of two. I had been too naïve to realise that in love between equals the responsibilities must be shared, that a time would come when I would be the strong one. But as I struggled to come to terms with his humanity I realised at last that it must be so. I cupped his chin in my fingers, tilting his face up toward my own.

"Treize," I whispered, "I understand. I'm not angry now."

A tired smile curved his lips. "I am relieved," he said. His eyes questioned me--he was unsure what I was planning, but then so was I. I planned nothing, I simply /acted/, for once without calculating what every move might bring me, because that is no way to use a love affair. There was a cry of surprise when I seized and kissed him, but I am sure that it came from my own throat.

The ends of my hair tickled my chin, my fingers clenched the crisp fabric of his jacket, even my eyelashes tangled as I kissed him--fervently, hungrily, refusing to let go. I pressed him back onto the bed, revelling in my newfound courage. I had never in my life been wanton--I had never wanted to be--but now I found it was liberating, to surrender to my own desire without consideration for what weakness I might show. Treize had trusted me with his own vulnerability, and at last I was free to do the same.

My sudden behaviour startled him, but his body reacted predictably and he hauled me above him, fumbling with the fastenings of my clothes. I straddled his hips, refusing to free his mouth from mine, as if, now that I had at last admitted how much I wanted him, I was afraid I would no longer hold any attraction for him once I let go. I do not remember how he managed to undress me without disattaching me, but he was always quite competent in such matters, and I was distracted by his touch and the rising fire in my blood. His arms wrapped around me; he gathered me up and surged upward so he was sitting with me on his lap. At last he tore his mouth away, soothing my whimper of loss with a whisper and a kiss, his tongue trailing along the line of my jaw and my neck. His fingers played across my skin, lighting fires along my naked flesh til every nerve was a separate self, crying out for his touch. I pushed ineffectually at his clothes, but already lust had formed a haze across my eyes, and the most I could do was feel the divergence as cloth gave way to sweat-glistened skin.

"Wufei...." His voice was tinted with as much disbelief as desire, and it made the sound of my name on his lips all the sweeter. I pushed forward, tumbling us once again to the mattress, attacking his throat with my tongue. His head fell back and I pressed my advantage, my hands stroking down his bare chest as I crawled between his legs. He had been in uniform; I peeled the tight white trousers from his body while my own quivered and trembled with the need to touch him.

I had him naked at last, and I ran my hands all up and down the length of him, exploring freely places I had once blushed to touch. He sensed, I think, how strange and heady this was for me, and did his best to lie still under my ministrations as I made myself comfortable with the intricacies of his body. But it was impossible to quell the effect we had on each other; indeed I was drunk on it, intoxicated by his scent and the salty taste of his skin, by the urgency in his touch and the smouldering of his azure eyes.

His body was perfect, unmarred by scars like those that marked my own, sculpted as truly as if he had been a statue. Fortunately, a statue he was not. I explored him with my tongue as thoroughly as my hands; the line of his neck and the hard planes of his chest and further yet below. His penis stood free and erect, twitching whenever my hands neared it, and like the wanton I had become I wanted to taste it. Treize let out a groan as my mouth covered it; a wordless moan strangled in a rush of sensation as his hands flew to tangle in my hair. He pressed my head down and I allowed him to, sucking as he arced against me, moving with the untimed gasps that escaped his lips. I toyed with him as I would never have thought myself capable of, teasing him with my tongue and my breath, promising release but ever refusing to deliver it.

He grasped my shoulders and hauled me up, rolling suddenly to pin me beneath him. "Wufei--" My name again, flooding my soul, buoying my desire for him.

"Kiss me," I demanded, and with a gasp he obeyed. His body covered mine, our skin slick with shared sweat, our eager erections bumping together in our frenzied movement. I spread my legs wide, and he straightened enough to hook my knees over his shoulders--there was no more discussion; we moved as a strained and desperate pair, our higher intellect scarcely aware of our bodies' tumult.

He began to stretch me. I would have protested the time it took for him to do so, but I knew without speaking that he would not have listened. Though we were not yet joined, our minds, it seemed, had merged, rendering mere words useless and finding poetry in every touch. He would not hurt me, and while my body ached for his presence, I appreciated the care he took with me.

He thrust into me at last, and my body swallowed him. Always before, it had taken time for me to adjust to him inside me, as my eager body forced my errant will into submission. This time there was no such discomfort, or if there was, I never noticed it. This lovemaking was headier than any drug that had ever aided my ancestors in meditation, I was alive with it, every nerve and pore singing the sensual praise of the man who claimed me.

I do not remember how the night ended, save for the flurry of passion and ill-stifled cries. I remember feeling full as I never had before. And I remember his arms around me, holding me close against him long after he had whispered his devotion and surrendered to sleep. He guarded me from my demons, and Nataku, for a night, was silent.

As long as men have told stories and fought battles, they have told of brave warriors who, defeated, swore their lives to the victors. Once I thought such men were weak fools. It was Treize who taught me differently. I am not the sort to be drawn by a body alone; if that was all I sought I would have found a woman. But the spark of an ancient soul and a kindred spirit called to me even while we fought, and his sword at my throat forced me to reassess my evaluation of him. It was the most poetic twist of tragedy, our meeting, for we could never be more than we became--soulmates, lovers, and bitterest foes.

~Owari~