Hello again! Sorry this took so long, I've been working on my website a lot lately. And sleeping. And stuff like that. Anyway, for a belated Christmas present you get a nice long chapter this time around. Mm, long chapter.
Disclaimer: I'm an unemployed teenager with maybe ninety-seven cents in her wallet. I own nothing. And all Winner sisters are my creation…except for Iria because she's real.
Quickie Recap: For those of you just tuning in, Quatre's been trampled, concussed, and asked to homecoming a minimum of three times already. And he's still gay.
Latin class was always amusing, especially considering that the Roman poets were dirty perverts, trying to weasel as many esoteric sexual allusions into their writing as humanly possible. And it didn't help that one of the senior boys, Trant Clark, would whoop and holler every time something sexual came up in a poem. Quatre sighed heavily, setting his bag down under his desk and sliding into the glossy faux wood seat bolted to the desk. His fingers twined in his bangs as he leaned forward on his elbows, staring blankly down at the desktop. A peanut butter cup slid past his arms, into his line of sight, and he glanced up at Hilde.
"You look down, thought you could a little pick-me-up peanut butter cup."
Sally leaned over her desk, grinning viciously. "That sounds like a bad rendition of 'Build Me Up, Buttercup,' in the making. What's the matter, Q? Don't tell me you're coming down with The Whoop."
The Whoop, otherwise known as whooping cough, was already slowly starting to spread through the halls of Silver Lake. Students would groan in revulsion whenever an office runner appeared with an official note from the nurse's office, but usually made light of the pertussis epidemic that inevitably broke out.
"I don't have whooping cough, I'm just tired. I didn't sleep well last night, not after my sisters coming home from whatever nightclub they were at until three in the morning. You haven't seen shit-faced until you see the Winner Five hit the bars of Boston."
Hilde stroked his head sympathetically. "Poor little Quatre. We'll make it up to you. How about another game of Fructus to make you feel better?"
"Hilde Deuseldorf Schbeiker, that was cruel!" Lia scolded, dropping her bag under her desk with a mighty thud. Trant quirked an eyebrow from where he was sitting.
"What kind of a middle name is 'Deuseldorf'?"
Hilde glared bullets at him. "Bite me, Clark. It's my mother's maiden name."
Quatre shook his head miserably. "It's going to be one of those days, I know it now. Just toss me off of the roof already and get it over with. By the way, if I manage to survive, I'd be willing to take you up on your offer, Lia."
"Cool," the brunette said, rummaging around for her Latin-to-English dictionary. "I'll pick you up around ten Saturday morning. Traffic shouldn't be too bad, and we can grab some food while we're up there."
Ms. Woodhouse and her young ward Mr. Welton arrived just then, the latter carrying a manila folder full of photocopies. The students groaned in revulsion at the sight of more lines to translate, for they were already growing sick of the reviled Ovid.
"Salvete, discipuli. Quid est hodie?"
The students all stared at the petite white-haired woman blankly. "Salve, Magistra. Hodie est…um…Thursday."
She chuckled and waved them off good-humoredly. "Right, well, let's hope the AP Exams don't ask for the days of the week, or you'll be in big trouble. How was the homework last night, any trouble?"
"It was the pipe simile," Lia groused. "I thought I'd seen the last of it with McCarthy, but no. We get to run Pyramus through all over again."
Mrs. Woodhouse laughed. "So then I take it there was no trouble, hm?"
The small Latin teacher had just sat down at her overhead machine, black marker and transparencies in hand, when a knock resounded on the door. Sally's eyebrows shot up.
"Toys from Mr. Bloomquist?" she asked excitedly. Sally had a habit of calling any official National Honors Society business 'toys,' and got rather excited whenever someone came knocking. Instead, it was a certain tall, slender youth, staring into the room with the same panic as a deer caught in the high beams of an oncoming Dodge Durango, his yellow guidance pass clamped firmly in his olive fingers.
"Oh yes, I almost forgot you were coming today. Kids, this is Trowa, he's moving up from Latin Three to Latin Four, so he'll be studying with us from now on. Trowa, you're from where?" Mrs. Woodhouse asked, getting up to usher her newest acquisition in.
"Italy," he said softly. His eyes, though mostly shrouded by his russet hair, darted around the room, trying to find a familiar face. His gaze fell along the back wall, where the two sopranos were sitting beside each other, with Quatre on the end.
"Quatre, is that desk next to you empty?"
He nodded, picking up the agenda he'd placed on it. "Yes, it is, Mrs. Woodhouse."
She pointed Trowa in the proper direction, handing him a book of Ovid poems, another of Catullus' works, and a dictionary. "Have a seat next to Quatre, we're just going over Pyramus and Thisbe right now."
"This is the third day, Katore. That's luck in Italy," Trowa muttered, flipping the Ovid book open to the passage they were working on. The blonde boy blushed, trying to hide behind his massive blue binder.
Quatre found it painfully difficult to pay attention to his teacher for the seventy-two minutes that remained in the period, especially considering the fact that the young man he had a crush on was sitting beside him. Trowa had been asked to translate a portion of the poem on the spot and he had, though he'd answered in Italian. The twenty or so students burst into peals of laughter, and even Quatre had to giggle behind his hand. Trowa, however, had the deer in the headlights look again for a few moments, until he'd realized what was so funny. He said nothing else for the rest of the class.
"It's no big deal, Trowa, you don't have to get all tight-lipped on us," Hilde stated as the students mingled, waiting for the dismissal bell to ring. "Shit like that happens all the time at the Mistake by the Lake."
Sally nodded. "My boyfriend Wufei once fell asleep in class. When the teacher called on him to read, he read an entire page of Julius Caesar in Mandarin Chinese."
"Don't forget, Quatre. Ten," Lia stated as the bell shrieked, the teenagers spewing out into the halls from the tiny doorframes.
"Ten, right! See you later!" he repeated. "And you too, Trowa."
~^*^~
Quatre found his gym class to be painfully boring. The teacher in charge of the archery unit was absent, and there was no substitute. All of the students in the archery unit were forced to sit in the balcony weight room and watch Tae-Bo tapes while a doddering old teacher kept his eye on them. He sighed, pulling a piece of white lined paper out of a binder, scribbling on the page absently.
"Doing anything interesting?" a quiet voice asked from beside him. Quatre glanced up, into the midnight blue eyes of Heero Yuy, Silver Lake's track all-star and god of all things audio, visual, and technical.
"No, not really. I thought you'd be in the corner meditating with Wufei."
Heero shrugged, his gaze going to the Chinese young man sitting in the lotus position on one of the grubby gym mats. "I have no desire to meditate with Wufei. Besides, he'd probably hedge me into some discussion on politics while still meditating."
"Right."
"You meet the kid from Italy yet? Had him in my physics class yesterday. Seems nice, quiet, but nice," Heero remarked.
Wufei opened one almond eye. "Quiet? The pot seems to be calling the kettle black, Yuy."
"Go back to meditating, Wufei. This conversation does not concern you."
Now the Chinese boy rose, stretched, and joined his Japanese and Arabian counterparts. "Not concern me? When we are discussing the shiny-new transfer student, who has been the buzz of conversation between my girlfriend and her girl-friends?"
Wufei made sure to make a clear distinction between his significant other and her friends, so as not to give the impression that Sally had lesbian tendencies.
"No, it does not concern you," Heero repeated. "This is talk that is beyond your ken, Wufei."
"Oh what, are we having a gay moment here? Then I guess I'll just have to leave. See you later, Will, Jack." Wufei walked off to sulk over by the balcony, watching the girls below doing yoga on some tired-looking blue mats.
Heero rolled his eyes. "Chikushoume. Nan dai oh."
Quatre pouted, crumpling up his piece of paper and lobbing it at the wastebasket. It missed.
"Heero, the only Japanese I understand is 'Domo Arigato, Mister Roboto.' If you're going to curse Wufei, do it in something I can snicker at."
"He's just a pain in the ass is all. Back to more important matters…do you like the Italian?" Heero asked in all seriousness, as if Quatre's life would hinge on the answer of the one question.
"Well yeah, Trowa's a very nice guy and I'm glad I'm friends with him…or starting to be friends with him. I don't know if saving me from stampeding underclassmen and concussions counts for friendship."
The Japanese boy's blue eyes narrowed. "Don't hedge. You know what I mean."
Quatre blushed the same color as the mulberry stretch warm-up pants he was wearing. They were really magenta velour girls' pants, hand-me-downs of his sisters, but they were comfortable and that was all he cared. "Uh-huh. I think he's wicked sweet."
"You should ask him out, then. Even if he's straight, make it sound like it's just some casual hangout and get to know him. It's how I met Duo."
"I thought you met Duo because he tried out for track and got his braid stuck in the bolts of one of the hurdles and Mr. Darche made you go untangle him."
Heero chuckled. "That was how I met Duo. I got to know him over pizza and a Star Wars movie three days later."
~^*^~
The bell rang not long after that, and Quatre was headed for lunch, which preempted the first half hour of choir. He usually brown-bagged whatever was in the refrigerator, and plopped himself down in one of the blue cafeteria chairs at the nearest table without much thought. Everyone else tended to gravitate towards him as they filtered in.
"Hello, Katore. Is someone sitting there?" Trowa asked quietly, almost causing Quatre to choke on his hummus and pita bread.
"Trowa!" he coughed. "Ah, no, no, it's free. Duo and the girls will be along shortly, I think…"
He thought wrong. Duo spotted Trowa approaching Quatre and herded everyone else to a different table, so the two could have the table to themselves. Duo prided himself on being a first-class matchmaker, and saw this as the opportunity of a lifetime. Get Quatre a boyfriend, and he'd be willing to go to homecoming and see what an idiot he'd been for missing it the past two years.
"So, um, you met my friend Heero in physics yesterday?" Quatre asked, tossing the rest of his half-eaten pita back in its Ziploc bag and nervously unpeeling a Clementine. Trowa nodded.
"He doesn't talk much. He seems very dark and mysterious…is this supposed to be spaghetti?" he asked, poking the gelatinous lump of something that vaguely resembled noodles in a primavera sauce. "You Americans are so…so…"
"Deprived?" Quatre offered. "I know. My sisters seem to think that all Italian food is pizza. They're not the brightest of the bright, I'm afraid."
Trowa attempted laughing while drinking Gatorade, the blue kind, and nearly choked. Quatre tried his best not to laugh at his green-eyed companion, but the both of them could not help but dissolve into laughter.
"If you are not doing much Sunday, you could come for lunch," Trowa offered after he'd sufficiently calmed down enough to speak and the coughing had subsided. "I can show you what real Italian food is like, Katore."
Quatre's grin outshone the fluorescent lights overhead. "Sure! I'd love to!"
"I will see you at one on Sunday then."
They chatted amicably for the remainder of lunch, though Quatre's racing heartbeat and the fuzz in his lightened head made it hard to hear. It turned out that Trowa had similar tastes in music and was a closet anime obsessive. He almost regretted that lunch was coming to an end, since there would be no time to talk in choir.
"So, what happened?" Duo whispered in his ear as the both of them made their way towards the huge trash bins at the front of the cafeteria, the remainders of their lunches in hand.
"I'm having lunch with him on Sunday. Oh God, Duo, I'm so nervous!"
The violet-eyed boy shrugged, grinning. "Eh, it's no big deal. You're a great kid, and he's a nice guy. You'll be fine."
He didn't feel very comforted by Duo's reassurance, and fretted about his plans all through choir and into English, until Mr. Rizzitano called him a space case and told him to focus more on Hester Prynne's situation than his "hot date with Alice Legs." Quatre didn't have the heart to tell him that his date was with "Johnny Football" instead.
"My sisters had better help me. Otherwise, I'm doomed," he thought grimly, doodling a little picture of Inu-Yasha in the corner of his notes.
~^*^~
"Amyra, Madiha, Clio, Kali, Iria! Emergency! Come here now!" Quatre shouted as soon as he got in the door. Sandrock was the only one to greet him, winding her furry body around his ankles. Kali and Madiha stumbled into the kitchen, looking positively wretched, the result of far too much partying and getting themselves completely shit-faced.
"Quatre, we're hung over. D'ya mind shutting up?" Madiha groaned.
He shook his head. "It's an emergency," he repeated. "I have a date on Sunday and I don't know what to wear. It's been driving me nuts all day!"
Kali seemed to perk up at the news, looking less like an MBTA Red Line train was zipping around in her skull. "Quatre, a date? Are you serious? Who'd you have to pay?"
"No pay…and it's not really a date, per se. My friend Trowa…the really hot transfer student from Florence…yeah, he invited me over for lunch on Sunday. He said his foster family was going out for the day and he wasn't too keen on staying by himself and we were talking about Italian food…so he asked me over for lunch and to watch some movies and stuff. How am I supposed to dress for this?"
The two Winner sisters sober enough to respond to his plea leaned over for a huddle. After several minutes of whispered deliberations, Madiha had her answer.
"I'm going to talk to Clio and the others and get back to you…after a nap and I sober up a little…maybe…oh God, I think I'm going to puke."
Quatre sighed. "I knew no good could come from Disco Wednesdays."
Iria found him about a half hour later struggling over trigonometric ratios, eating a bowl of chocolate-covered pretzel ice cream and absently tossing a crocheted ball across the kitchen floor for Sandrock. Out of the five sisters, she was probably the most sober at the time.
"Hi," she mumbled, sitting down on one of the bar stools. "Mads and Kali told us about your date. So what'd you have in mind? Casual or sexy beyond the belief of every hormonal teenage homosexual male this side of Gloucester?"
He glanced up from his pre-calculus and ice cream and shrugged. "Is there a way for both?"
Iria pouted. "Dunno. Hang on a sec." She got up from the stool, lumbered over to the doorway that led towards the media room where the rest of the sorority was sprawled.
"Can we have both casual and sexy love bunny?" she bellowed.
Clio hollered back, "Sure! Do like a leather pants and a TV shirt from Hot Topic combo or something!"
"I don't have any of that!" Quatre pointed out. "I dress like I'm some sort of Brady Bunch refugee, you know that!"
Kali piped up this time. "You're going shopping Saturday, just buy it all then!"
Quatre nodded, thanking his sisters for helping him in their "weakened and ill" conditions, while they in turn grunted their replies and returned to being hopelessly hung over. He sighed loudly, watching Sandrock chase a ladybug across the kitchen floor.
"I hope this works out. God, please let him be gay. Or at the very least, bi. I'm starting to feel very lonely, and to tell you the truth, if he asked me, I'd go to homecoming in a heartbeat. Please, please God?"
God didn't make any indication that He was willing to answer the prayers of one small boy, but Quatre wasn't going to give up hope any time soon. His father was a firm believer in the 'things happen for a reason' philosophy, and he shared his father's views. Perhaps it was a sign that this wonderful young man should walk into his life and never seem to leave.
"Please…"
~^*^~
Disco Wednesdays, gotta watch out for them. Oh, I didn't mention it last chapter so I will now. I can't drive, so any driving Lia may do in this fanfic is completely flubbed. And this chapter, well, I never got to go eat Italian with any hot transfer students, but the quotes from Anthony "Thunder" Rizzitano are completely true.
Next Chapter: Shopping fun with Lia! But waitaminute, why's her sister in the car too?
