Water
"Water," said Quatre, quietly to himself. "water everywhereÉand I suppose I could even drink it. But it's too easy to sit and let it fall on me instead.
Around him what seemed to be (when he put his eye way up close to it and imagined the tiny bumps in the spackle to be huge boulders) miles and miles of green tile wept in long, runny trails. The tears carved through the light film of tiny droplets condensing on the cool surface, creating fantastic, dripping, ever-changing masterpieces. Quatre was vaguely annoyed by anything that resembled tears invading his sanctuary, and the drops destroyed the carefully etched masterpieces of calligraphy and hand prints in the thing veneer of the steamed walls, but they were a necessary evil.
The larger drops annihilating Quatre's creative spirit were a by-product of the three powerful showerheads that hovered over him, arbiters of fate, dispenser of all things good in the separate universe that he regarded the shower stall as. It was, really, his own little place of heat and wetness and clean beauty that he wouldn't give up even for the sake of the other universe he sometimes visited.
Every other room in the house had been carefully planned by an interior decorator back in his father's time, every shade matching, every carefully placed object correctly aligning with the others to please the eye with their smooth flow and regularity, but this was Quatre's room, and the interior designer had never even been consulted on the vision-searing shade of aquamarine that tiled the massive shower, or the bright plastic cups and toothbrushes around the sink with it's ridged interior that made him want to scream whenever he had to clean it.
It was a sanctuary for his mind, and it was his mind that built it, his mind that held it against the others. It was, really, about his favorite thing in all of reality, this world and the outside, to lie and feel the water wash around him and press where it needed to press and flow where it needed to flow and everywhere suffuse him with a warm blush and cloud the gleaming citadel with a nearly tangible mist that felt like a giant, puffy cloud that if he were only a little lighter he could recline upon.
There were certainly no responsibilities to this world, even the cleaning was it's own brand of satisfaction, knowing the tile would shine and no splashes of sparkly blue toothpaste would break the clean lines of the sink. And the other world held no power, it's tense muscles succumbed quickly to the massage of the triple showerheads, it's thoughts were lost in swirls of sensation, hot water and cool tile, warm mist and slick, plastered-down hair.
All his life Quatre had suffered from feeling too much, and now he found the solution was to choose his own sensations. And to choose them carefully.
He chose warmth and comfort, he left behind cold and pain. He chose cleanliness and relaxation over the imperfection and angst of the world outside of the door he himself had painted white , the handle he polished first every time he cleaned his precious bathroom.
He chose the world of nerves and synapses over that of the constant naggings in his mind. The sear of anger, the shock and choking emotion of hatred, and the icy knife in his soul that came every time sorrow invaded his heart. He just couldn't deal. The emotions were alien, they were without cause, without rhyme, without reason. He could take pain, and he could frolic for hours in the joy that was hot, falling water, but in matters of the heart he only knew and understood one of the feelings.
There were happy ones, he knew, the buzz of joy, the hum of happiness, the deep swellings of another's love in his heart that could overturn the tiny ships of hatred and sorrow, but they were so little, so late, and when they left it was worse than if they had never been there at all. To soar amongst the heights, he was willing to climb, but the fall hurt more than anything else, and every day it seemed he could feel the happiness in him crumble into less, worse than nothing at all.
When he wanted to cry his shower wept for him, the long lines pulling ever down, down, down, ripping away those idle things he did outside of surviving, his careful spellings of his name in all the alphabets he knew, the spirals and hearts and wave lines of a hand drawn over the canvas for no more reason than to see if the wall was any different when viewed between his fingers. And without his pretty delusions that there was more to life than to relax and be swept away in the current there was nothing to do but make more delusions, BETTER delusions, even though it would hurt even more to watch them go.
It had been years and years since the strange feelings came to him first, tickling at the edge of his mind to form hunches that saved his life again and again until he had to admit that they were always right about people and what they were thinking. Soon he could sense a person's nature with a quick look in their direction, then, after the war, he started to feel their emotions simply by being in their presence.
Then he saw words, their thoughts, their secrets, their yearnings and sorrow could become his just by walking through a crowd they were part of, just by sitting in the seat they had sat in on the bus. That's when he had built his shower. To make it stop, even for just a while, to make it all go away even if it would come back worse than ever.
Time flowed slowly in the shower, but it came to an end eventually. The hot water unit only worked so fast, and on L4 water was expensive, so soon, too soon, there were soft pings from the showerheads and a distinct cooling against his skin that made him lunge with a foot for the water knobs to close down the machine before the awful fall from the dizzying height of the heat to the abyss of bone-chilling cold could harm him. The last of the softly trickling, sparkling flow would disappear down the drain, and now he wanted to weep with the walls still collecting his precious steam and using it to destroy his art, because it wasn't long now before he had to leave.
It was, as always, worse than having never gotten in, to leave his shower. He could sit for hours, each second another moment of pain and loss and chill, each worse than the next, letting his hair dry into frizzy clumps of sand, frantically trying to write his name in kanji, in Arabic, in roman characters, into the wall as his canvas fell away from under his fingers.
And in the last moments, he hated himself for being so weak as to sit and sit and let it hurt even more, hate himself for ever daring to think that anything he would build wouldn't simply be broken and be worse than having never had it in the first place.
And his sanctuary was broken and he was cold and sad and curled into a ball in the corner of a nearly-dry shower with his towel seconds away through freezing air. Quatre's hands knew that soon they would have to leave off protecting his delicate legs, that he would need to pull his chest away from his thighs and his back from the body-warmed tile, before he could have his towel, and that he would need the towel before soft, warm clothes, and clothes before bed and sweet dream-speckled oblivion.
But they wouldn't move. Neither would Quatre. Everything he made would just break, eventually even the little fort his body was now to keep in the heat. Everything so cyclical, but with the second law of thermodynamics demanding that the cycle was a net loss of happiness into his surroundings, until
"Until what? The joy death of the universe?
The words were so familiar, so near and close to him he nearly called them his. And they were, except for their physical origin; the thoughts they came from were hisÉand the mouth they came from
Éthe arms that came with the mouth, wrapping his legs, the forehead on his knees, the voice in his head that he always listened to above all the others...
"Who was it today?
Éthe questions, the ones he asked himself, the care in the voice
"My secretary." Quatre remembered now, the pathetic smile that used to be the full, broad grin that gave the woman the strength to deal with her boss's problem and still keep him from going insane with her annoyance at them. The chasm of pain hidden in eyes that once glowed and leapt with passion and eagerness.
"She got dumped." It wasn't a question now. Quatre definitely remembered searching her out amongst WEI's talent pool, the wonderful interview where he could feel innocent love pooling within the sweet, pretty young girl
Back then the pain hadn't been so acute, not quite so awful, but it had been getting worse since the war's end. Someone as close to him as his secretary had to be constantly happy to keep off his nerves when he had hired her first.
Now he felt secondhand emotions even more strongly than the people they came from, and a minor spat could send him to his shower for hours.
Remembering made it worse, the contrast between the sharp ache still in him and the memory of the inner fire that used to burn away such chills, it made him want to cry again. No shower could cry for him now, the shower was gone, the tears flowed from eyes now to stain cheeks.
Four eyes. Four cheeks.
Quatre wanted to push him away, wanted to pull Trowa's face off of his knees, wanted to stop sucking at his warmth and build his own hell his own way, but all he could do was cling tighter and drink even more deeply of the well in his lover's one visible eye, a sliver of green in the tiny gap between Quatre's knees.
Trowa wouldn't have gone anyway. He didn't have to say so. Quatre didn't have to say he should, but he felt it added weight. "Go," he said, "everything I build breaks, everything hurts more than it should, than it would have if you would just leave and take care of the lions and the sister that I KNOW you miss and get out of here now before you run crying and screaming and cursing my name and-" a choked sob, "andÉand
Quatre sputtered to a halt, then started in again. He said all the hateful things he could, all the hurtful things he could, he tried to fight and destroy the love he felt in them, the shared thing that could no longer only be Quatre or only be Trowa. He tried to put out the light that they shared, that they didn't even really share because there was so much of it that they never had to ration it between them, and he tried tried tried to throw the only thing of his left that he cared for away before the love he built for it broke and threw them both down to hell.
He told Trowa it would hurt and Trowa only smiled. He said he was too good for Trowa, and Trowa only laughed. He changed tactics and said that he was too good for Trowa, that no penniless orphan could steal his heart, that no fag could ever touch his blonde aristocratic perfection, but Trowa could feel the lie before the words even reached his ears, and just pulled Quatre closer.
Trowa spoke now so that the words were real, and Quatre couldn't tell himself that it was impossible to read a mind, no matter how close the mind was to him.
"I didn't know when I became your boyfriend that it would end like this. If I had I would have come to you sooner. Now I can no more leave you than you can leave yourself, and I don't want it any other way. I hated being me, Quatre, lover, anata, mihubb, almost as much as I love being us, and feeling for you and being with you wherever we go and whatever we do. I don't care if every waking hour of OUR waking days is plagued with the fear and doubt of every other human in the universe. Because I've found the only thing in the world I wanted more than to die for you. To live for US, to share your pain and your bed and your life and your mind and your heart.
Quatre was shaking now, but the tears were gone, sucked into the bottomless pit of love they shared, love like the water from his shower only it would never run out or go cold, endless and flowing evenly in an infinite amount from them ever moment of every day. It swallowed his tears for the secretary's loss, his anger at himself for being so weak, his hatred at himself for ever making Trowa feel his pain, for knowing Trowa's next words and longing for them, for needing the seal that they made on his previous speech, for wanting to be the strange, hybrid freak of feeling that he had described and drag another's life down with his own for the sake of his twisted obsession.
But Trowa's didn't have to say those last few words, because Quatre could feel their heart, THEIR heart, pulse with the love that there was no need to profess. There was no need for either of them to say the words when they could live them.