Disclaimer: If the Easter Bunny gave anyone any chocolate pilots, I wanna know about it. =P (Oh, and, all the best characters in this story were made by someone else, darnit. So don't sue me.)
~~~~~~~~~~Episode Eighty-Two: Stay
"Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own." ~Johann Wolfgang von GoetheMay 24th, 1903
This was the last stand. The final battle. The ultimate risk. If this didn't pay off, he would have to pack it in for sure. All his other resources had been exhausted without any gains and the whole ordeal was about an inch away from not being worth the trouble.
Only a few ticks of the clock past dawn, Tristan approached the doorway to the conservatory, constantly looking behind him as he advanced on the mere balls of his feet. He hadn't been getting anywhere with anybody, and it was frustrating. If only one of the beautiful people he worked with had been willing to oblige him with the naughty boy's spanking he had wanted so badly, he was sure they would have become great friends. As it was, zilch.
Finally, Tristan rubbed his hands together and made his move, vanishing into Bridlewood's miniature greenhouse with the singular purpose in mind of trying the last remaining avenue of affection open to him. All was unusually quiet outside in the hallway, and a passer-by who might have seen Tristan go in could have easily gotten the impression that he at last found a willing body with which to play his favourite games.
Tristan backed out of the conservatory in slow motion with his hands in the air. He was followed by the point of a thin sword held an inch from his chest. The sword was followed by an arm, and the arm was attached to Quatre. The gardener was not amused. He backed Tristan slowly up into the opposite wall, now back to wearing his usual pale pastel clothes for indoor duties, and despite the frilliness of his colour choices, he didn't look like he was going to take any guff from anybody.
"If you have to use your grabby hands instead of your voice to say something," Quatre said, slowly and with purpose, "I don't think I want to know what it is." His own voice was fierce yet icy, sending out a clear, unspoken warning. After a moment, he lowered the sword, but kept it at the ready.
Flushed with both defeat and embarassment, Tristan grabbed the front of his red uniform jacket with both hands and yanked down sharply to straighten it, vainly attempting to salvage his pride even as his nose and ears were turning bright crimson. "You're all nutters," he blurted angrily, and as Quatre's eyes followed, he walked away and quickly picked up speed as he fled the scene, mortified but indignant.
He went straight to Otto and tendered his resignation.
**********There was a morning shower in Southampton, just enough to give the flowers a drink, and then it stopped, much to Marcus' delight. He had made an express journey to the Peacecrafts' country estate, driven by a touch of spring fever, and didn't want his one perfect day tainted by an excess of rain. He was wearing one of his favourite outfits, a velvety forest green frock coat--not necessarily in style anymore, but still his most cherished--over fawn trousers, a silvery-patterned waistcoat, and a brown satin ascot tie. It was the same outfit he wore the day he was introduced to Relena, plus a few alterations to allow for expanding shoulder breadth, hence its peculiar significance.
Marcus patted one of the great stone lions on the nose as he walked the long gravel path from the gates to the front door, surrounded by austere pillars, pretty planters full of new spring blooms, and the odd horse and cart belonging to a tradesman. One was marked as belonging to a plasterer, and another was the property of a plumber. There were surely many more like them around the back. Marcus smirked to himself as it seemed that Relena's crazy idea of opening a hotel was beginning to take shape.
He hopped up the front steps to the sprawling mansion and took a few deep breaths, talking himself up to actually ringing the doorbell. In his right hand, quivering slightly, was a bouquet of tulips, tiger lilies, and bright green ferns all wrapped in decorative paper. He held it in front of him like a shield, and yet it seemed to be sapping his defensive energies the longer he possessed it. After running a hand through his unorthodox mane of wavy tan hair for the umpteenth time, he took a flying leap and yanked on the bell pull, bobbing around nervously from one foot to the other.
When the door eventually opened, Marcus froze briefly. It was only Pegan standing in front of him, but still. "Can I help you?" the butler asked in a fatherly way.
".....I would...I would speak to like with Re--.....I would like to speak with...Miss Relena," he croaked out, clearing his throat once or twice along the way. "...well, I mean, I don't know if I can, that's what I'm supposed to ask first, 'can I,' or 'may I,' rather. Please. Mustn't forget 'please,' or what would you think of me?" He laughed a jittery, uneasy laugh. "Um...is she.....is she in?"
Pegan smiled at the boy, thinking back to an incident between himself and the father of a certain Miss Fannie Pettigrew when he was no more than seventeen, also involving a bouquet of flowers and a temporary speech impediment. "Do come in, Mr. Wyndham," he entreated, stepping away from the door.
Marcus expressed his hasty and embarassed thanks as he all but jumped into the marble-tiled foyer, and Pegan retreated to the inner depths of the house to fetch Miss Peacecraft. Upon hearing who was standing in the front hall, Relena gratefully dropped what she was doing in the library and was halfway there before she remembered she was wearing a dismal dress, no jewellery, and not a lick of her subtle maquillage. She started on a detour up to her room to make herself up, stopped, berated herself for still being at least partly obsessed with her looks, began rushing back down the stairs, stopped again, reminded herself that it was Marcus waiting for her after all, and then wheeled back up to her room, deciding she could bend her principles as far as a pinch of rouge and a nicer dress. Marcus could hear the frantic and distant footsteps changing direction, but couldn't make heads or tails of any of it.
Finally, dolled up to a minimal degree, Relena came down the main staircase in a dress of lavender chintz with tiny roses on it, all smiles. "Marcus!" she twittered happily, trotting down the stairs in poor brown shoes that she forgot to change, but also that Marcus didn't seem to notice. Her eyes lit up when she saw the bouquet. "Are those for me?"
"For the loveliest flower in the whole of England," Marcus delivered in an exquisitely-rehearsed phrase as he handed the bouquet over, the first thing he had said all day without stuttering.
Relena let herself squeal just a little bit as she took the flowers and cradled them adoringly. "They're beautiful..."
"Rumours are flying about what you're doing to this place, and if any of them are to be believed, you must be working very hard. I thought you needed a surprise."
"Oh, I did," she agreed emphatically, after giving the blossoms an extended, luxurious sniff. "I'll fetch Pegan back so he can put them in some water, he won't have gone too far. Would you like to put your feet up in the main parlour? It's one of the few rooms left that hasn't been mauled beyond recognition..."
This was the tricky part. "Actually," Marcus ventured, rubbing his hands together as a reflex, "I've also come to have a brief word with your brother, if I could see him before we get into a really deep 'catch up on things' chat."
Relena didn't find this to be the least bit strange. She nodded brightly. "Of course! He's in the library right now with Miss Noin. I'll show you the way." Turning quickly to the centre of the house, she stepped lightly along, leading Marcus past vast areas of ongoing renovations, with brusque but precise workmen plying their trades over miles of white drop cloth. She took him straight into the library without stopping to talk to anyone, and found her brother behind the well-used work table, crunching his fair share of the numbers. Lucrezia didn't appear to be present, and Milliardo looked up just at the point of his sister's arrival. "Look who's come to visit us!" Relena chirped merrily, still cuddling the flowers.
There was an unusally awkward silence as she left the men to their business. Milliardo only barely acknowledged Marcus, of whom his sister spoke from time to time, and always with a smile tickling her lips. Marcus kept his hands in his pockets and looked around, partly for a place to sit and partly for a sign of acceptance. He could locate neither. "...your Lordship?" he begged quietly.
"I am not 'Lord' Peacecraft," Milliardo corrected sternly, still looking down at invoices and financial statements.
"Sorry," said Marcus sheepishly. He ambled up to the desk, in the absence of a chair, still very non-threatening. "Um...could I have a word?"
Milliardo begrudgingly put down his pen and folded his hands on the mahogany table, gazing out through wisps of platinum hair obscuring his eyes like a self-protective cage. The gas lamp on the corner of the table gave the whole scene a mystical orange luminescence, and perhaps an over-inflated sense of gravity. "If you must."
Marcus blanked out for a moment, once again snowed under by nerves, but he made a rapid recovery, leaning forward enough to just brush the tabletop with his fingertips. "This is bound to be a bit odd, no matter how you slice it, but circumstances bein' what they are.....what I'm trying to say is, this is something I should have liked to discuss with your father, but in his stead...well, I'm reasonably positive that you are the right person to talk to.
"I've come to...ask your permission.....to court your sister, officially." Marcus glanced down, hoping the gaslight would hide his faint blushing. "I come from an old-fashioned family, you see. We like to do things properly. So...with that in mind, I'd like to build the first cordial bridge between your family and mine by...declaring my intentions." He was lucky he could speak at all by the end, but he got it all out, and breathed an inner sigh of relief.
Milliardo was appalled. He seemed like a nice boy and everything, but his sister was presently engulfed in a global war. It was hardly the time to be playing doctors and nurses behind the bicycle shed with her sweetheart. Even he himself had stepped back from Lucrezia a bit in recent weeks, choosing to focus his attention on more wordly matters. "I doubt she'll have time," he said rather curtly.
"...for what?"
"For you." Irked, Milliardo slapped the stylograph that laid on the table, clasped his fist around it, and threatened to squeeze the ink out from both ends. "Her priorities have changed. She can no longer afford the personal luxuries that ordinary people enjoy, and at the top of that list is fanciful ideas about romance." Little did the man realize that during his tirade, Lucrezia was creeping out of the shadows with two books tucked in the crook of her arm, listening with interest. "If you want to do her a favour, just leave her be," he continued in ignorance. "Under current circumstances...I cannot endorse anything more."
Marcus looked like a kicked puppy. "You're not...going to give us your blessing?"
Milliardo rotated the pen around in his hand, leaned forward over the papers, and got back to work. "I have none to give."
It went deathly quiet in the library. Marcus looked from side to side, evaluating the possibility that the elder Peacecraft was simply in a rotten mood, and that he would have gotten the same response no matter how nicely the subject had been brought up. Milliardo failed to look up at all after that, so Marcus had little choice but to grovel backwards out of the room, as quietly and unobtrusively as he could. He slipped away from the library, determined to enjoy the rest of his visit with Relena by not revealing her brother's opinion, and as soon as he was gone, Lucrezia stepped out of the shadows, looking miles away from happy herself. She strode up to the table, waited for Milliardo to look up and acknowledge her, and when he failed, slammed the books she was carrying down onto the table with frightening force.
At last, he looked up. "Something the matter?" he asked, only half-trying to sound interested if something was.
"I heard what you told that poor boy," Lucrezia said, icy-faced and sounding more than miffed. "What do you mean, interfering in Relena's friendships like that!?"
"I wasn't interfering. He came to me. And it's up to me to set people straight when they start inflicting their over-romanticized selves on my family. Relena doesn't have room in her life for that sort of thing anymore."
Lucrezia slowly paced away from him, to the corner of the table, and tilted her head slightly towards him, her entire manner turning positively ghostly. "Does that apply to us as well?"
The scene froze. All the effort each of them had expended to return to each other's company, the months upon months spent either being smuggled across Europe or walking the frontlines of the Boer War, all of the heart-wrenching angst over the horrible separation they had endured, all of that was called into question in the blink of an eye. Suddenly it wasn't just a momentary withdrawal of affection that was taking place, something Lucrezia had told herself was to be expected what with all the pressure Milliardo was heaping on himself, but a saddening about-face that was threatening to make itself permanent. On top of all this, he still hadn't said anything to reassure her.
Eventually, Lucrezia turned her head back to centre and walked back into the shadows without uttering another word.
**********There was a lot of wisdom in everything Catherine had to say on the subject of seeking employment, which was rather surprising when one took into account that she had only ever had one job herself. Her advice was succinct, valuable, and well thought-out, but in spite of all this, she had missed one very important point, and Heero felt certain that he knew what that point was.
He thought about it as he chose his clothes that morning; the black suit, however faithful, was getting a bit worn in places, so he swapped it for his casuals in various shades of beige, but being well-dressed or not wasn't the point Catherine missed. He thought about it as he contemplated his breakfast in a middle-class café; after watching those socially above him eating their meals, he noticed that he had been holding his knife and fork in the wrong hands all this time, but being well-mannered at the table wasn't the point Catherine missed either. He stopped thinking about it for awhile when he passed a candy shop, pausing long enough to buy some butterscotch sweets for Duo. Thinking of his friend reminded him of how disappointed the chef would be if he found out what Heero was planning to do, but a little avoidance and perhaps a white lie or two would fix that.
Hiding the little paper sack of hard candies in the pocket of his camel-coloured jacket, he proceeded directly to the address he had picked out of the newspaper the day before, in a well-to-do but not overly snobbish business district. He made it to the appropriate door without incident, and took a moment to read the sign. It was an employment agency.
A bell hanging just over the door gave a cheery chime as the door was opened and a handsome young man in a tan suit stepped in. He had a healthy aura of confidence and eyes of a determined sort of blue, which reasonably made up for his messy dark brown hair. Opposite him, in a chair behind a smart-looking desk behind another chair, was a bespectacled man of about thirty-five with thinning hair and a bushy moustache, in keeping with the current men's styles. When the young man entered, he looked up from his desk immediately and smiled. "Good morning, may I be of assistance?" he asked in a chipper accent.
The young man took the plain wooden chair in front of the desk and looked around the little office, populated also by two busy lads with their heads buried in their own work, not much older than he was. There was a tastefully understated decorating scheme, with photographs of local landmarks and a few potted plants, making it moderately welcoming, but still very professional. "You may, if you can find a position worthy of my peculiar talents," the dark-haired youth said with self-assurance.
"That is why we're here," the balding man said with a smile, opening a drawer in his desk and taking out some papers. "We can start a new file on you right away. Your name, sir?" He held his fountain pen at the ready, awaiting a reply.
This was where the important point Catherine missed was about to come into play, and also where Duo would have had a few choice words to spout on the subject of being true to one's self, had he been present. The dark-haired lad crossed his legs casually and balanced his clasped hands on one knee, the picture of serenity. "Harvey Young," said he.
"Harvey...Young," the balding man repeated as he wrote the name down at the top of the registration form. Then he squinted and looked up. "Do pardon me for asking this, sir, but are you an American?"
Here came the second blow. "Yes, I am," said the boy with a faint smile.
"I should warn you straight away, in order to be employed properly anywhere in the British Empire, you'll need the proper paperwork..."
Mr. Young barely blinked at the problem. "I can get you anything you need by tomorrow." Indeed, there was a more than sufficient set of credentials sitting in the writing desk of one Heero Yuy. After many months of disuse, the alias was finally coming in handy.
"Excellent!" the balding man cheered, adjusting his specs. "I'm sure there won't be any problems at all, in that case. Now, before we can start matching you up with prospective employers, we'll need to complete this worker profile..." And so went the rest of the interview, as Mr. Young answered the next fifty questions with grace and good humour, providing a sugar-coated version of his work experience to date.
On the inside, Heero sighed with a pinch of sadness when it became clear that his suspicions were correct. Not every door was open to a foreigner like him. The farther removed one was from the English 'norm', the more likely that person would end up in the sweatshops, and the slums. Certain groups might get slightly better treatment, for political reasons, such as the Americans, the east Indians, and perhaps even the French, but the Japanese were barely a blip on the map to the average English employer. Hardly worth considering.
Harvey Young, however, was potentially in very high demand, and was told so during his interview. Harvey Young could do just about anything he wanted.
**********"...and that's the proper way to tell if a loaf of bread is done," said Merlyn, after she turned her fresh-baked loaf onto a wire rack and rapped on the bottom, creating a hollow knocking sound. "Of course, I wouldn't expect you to know that, why, you're just a child!" she laughed as she patted Duo on the head. They were standing at the kitchen table--or rather, Merlyn was standing and smiling, and Duo was slouched right over the wooden slab in agony, propped up by two weary arms. The perky redhead didn't seem to notice. "Now, if you're baking baguettes, that's an entirely different matter, and here's what you do..."
Duo could have sighed audibly, but he knew it wouldn't make a darned bit of difference. She wouldn't listen. She never listened. She would keep on pontificating to him about the best way to do everything in his kitchen until her voice gave out or he hit her over the head with a cast iron frying pan. So far, neither one had ever happened.
"...and then in the fall of '96, I was selected to join the kitchen of Francois Dupris, and that was a wonderful day, let me tell you! And the food! Now, those people are really on the cutting edge of cuisine. Did I ever tell you about the time I met the creator of the Orange Chocolate Brioche that won top honours at the Seine Valley Cooking Competition in '93? I was out choosing eggplants, when..."
She was a bragging machine. Duo met the creator of the Waldorf Salad, but he didn't ram it down peoples' throats at every opportunity. He leaned heavily on both arms, hung his head, and counted to ten. God, please, make her stop. Give me some kind of interruption. Make the phone ring. Make it rain with thunder and lightning. Make the roof cave in. Just shut her up for five minutes! Puh-leeeze!! I'll take anything, you hear me!? I will take absolutely any kind of interruption!!
The back door to the kitchen opened, and Merlyn stopped speaking at last. Two scruffy men in overalls and tweed caps entered without invitation, carrying a toolbox each, and walked right past the pair at the kitchen table and into the little room off to the side that contained the guts of the bell pull system. Without so much as a word of greeting, they set down their toolboxes, armed themselves with this instrument and that, and set to work dismantling the massive board of bells.
Yes, it shut Merlyn up, but Duo wasn't sure that this was really what he had asked for. He stomped into the bell room and poked one of the workmen in the shoulder, hard. "Hey! Whaddaya think you're doing!? Who said you could come in here and start mucking around with things!?"
"I did," said an unpleasantly familiar nasal voice, and Bertram Augustus stepped out of the stairwell, staring Duo down. "The bell pull system was badly mangled by someone. These men are here to put it right."
If Duo hadn't become so paralyzed by the prospect of being put down in the butler's little leather book of evildoers, which could have cost him in the pocketbook, he would have whipped up a marvelous protest against the destruction of Heero's invention, but he couldn't muster the courage to do anything but stand and watch. The workmen began taking down the multitude of bells that both Heero and Duo had scoured the city to find, and it felt like just one more attempt by fate to erase all evidence that Heero had ever lived under that roof. Biting his tongue, Duo wrapped his arms tightly around himself and turned away from the bell room in a bit of a resigned gesture.
Satisfied that the chef was becoming much better trained in obedience, Bertram Augustus deemed him worthy to receive the information he had coming to him. "Very good. Now, if you're quite finished expressing your opinions, you have a visitor."
Duo looked up in surprise, letting his arms fall back at his sides as the thrill of the unknown tapped him on the shoulder. He never got visitors. There was hardly anyone out there who would want to visit him, he thought, who couldn't just let themselves in through the back, unless it was Heero in disguise. "Who is it?"
"A relative of yours, I gathered," the butler said blandly. Had it been a visitor for a member of the family instead of one of the downstairs staff, he might have put more effort into remembering the name.
"I don't have any relatives," Duo snapped back, scowling.
The butler began turning back toward the stairs, but paused to look down the end of his nose at Duo from head to toe, and flicked his eyebrows up in a mock apology. "My mistake for making assumptions based on appearances," he said. "You have my permission to go as far upstairs as the butler's pantry. Your visitor is waiting for you there." And then he left.
Typical, Duo thought. Most guests go to the parlour, but that's way too good for the likes of me, now. I wonder why he just didn't bring whoever it is down here... He waited a moment or two for the butler to get well ahead of him on the stairs, and then ascended, preparing himself as best he could for the new arrival.
**********After seeing that the workmen were well-established in the bell niche, and informing the chef of his caller, Bertram Augustus went looking for another member of staff on equally important business. An overseas telegram had arrived for the gardener, so he headed for his last reported location, which was the conservatory.
The glass-walled room overlooking the back patio seemed to be empty, except for the hundreds of potted green things all staring at the intruder. After only a moment's inspection, the butler was about to leave and search somewhere else when some faint motion outside on the lawn caught his attention. Mr. Sagheer and Mr. Barton were on opposite sides of a six-foot tree, a narrow evergreen with its roots balled up in burlap. They each had ahold of the tree at the base of the trunk and at the side of the burlap ball, and were shuffling the very heavy plant ever so gradually toward the exterior door, keeping it less than an inch off the ground. It was a difficult task, having to pick the tree up and move it half a step at a time while fully bent over at the waist, so in a rare display of empathy, Bertram Augustus opened up the French doors and propped them out of the way by sliding their locking pegs into the pre-drilled holes in the floor, then stepped back to observe at a safe, clean distance.
Trowa and Quatre very carefully brought the tree into the greenhouse, bit by bit, exchanging glances that seemed to communicate wordless volumes about the butler's presence. When they made it just inside the doorway, they stood at attention, politely waiting to hear what the man obviously had to say. As usual, the first words out of his mouth were a criticism. "Would you care to explain what that is doing here?" he said acridly, nodding to the tree. "Even with my limited knowledge of botany, I do perceive that this is not an indoor plant."
In Trowa's mind, it would have made more sense to object before they went to the trouble of bringing it inside, but Quatre understood that it was very uncouth to admonish the staff out in the open where the neighbours might see. "It's a replacement for one of the cedars at the back," he explained. "It's dying of root rot, and if I don't plug the hole with something the same size, it'll make the windbreak useless."
"Even so, why bring it in here?"
"Because I have to treat the roots of the new tree with a special solution before transplanting, not to mention how long it'll take to clean out the diseased soil the old one left behind, and this was the only day the tree farm could deliver, an--"
"Very well," the butler snapped him off, holding up a weary hand to stop him. He hadn't the faintest clue that he had just been fed a load of horticultural hooey, but by his own admission, he wasn't much of a botanist. "That's not why I'm here anyway," he continued, taking an envelope from his inside coat pocket and holding it out formally in his white-gloved hand. "Telegram for Mr. Sagheer."
The boys both stared at the outstretched envelope, but strangely, neither one moved. They gnawed on their lower lips, twiddled their fingers and glanced from side to side, but they couldn't seem to budge from their spots, tightly mashed up against either side of the tree. The butler was growing impatient, they could tell. "Fine," Quatre said hesitantly. "I'll just...walk up and get it from you...right now," he added, and he seemed to be talking to someone who wasn't even there, if that was possible. He slowly stepped away from the tree, and the stubby branches he was leaning against shifted down to fill the space he left behind.
Bertram Augustus squinted suspiciously at the pair of them. They were up to something, but he couldn't be sure what. Quatre took the telegram from him at last and smiled with a sweet 'Thank you,' even as he searched the other man's psyche for signs of skepticism. He did, however, have more important matters to deal with elsewhere in the house, so he left the boys to it, whatever it was, based on their fairly good records of obedience to date.
Quatre watched the butler leave, swallowing and feeling the tiny beads of sweat shift on the surface of his throat as he did so. Once the man was safely gone, he dashed to the door, closed it gently, and locked it. "All clear!"
Two tired sighs were heard from the direction of the cedar tree. One belonged to Trowa as he lurched away and massaged his lower back with one hand while brushing cedar sprigs off his green turtleneck with the other. The second sigh belonged to Heero, as he dove out from behind the tree, collapsed into a white iron filigree garden chair and bent over to rub his calf muscles. He had been tip-toeing and sidestepping into the house with the tree as cover, mindful of Otto's threat to have him arrested if he was caught on the property again. The last three minutes straight of holding a precarious position on the balls of his feet while barely breathing were by far the worst.
"Are you alright?" Quatre asked Heero, standing by his chair and leaning over a bit.
Heero frowned tiredly, disgusted at the lengths he had to go to in order to break into his old home. "If nothing else, it's convinced me never to take up ballet."
"If you don't like that, you should try being a professional duckblind," Trowa snarked, still kneading his lower back.
"I owe you both dinner, if the warden will ever let you out of your cells to collect it," said Heero. Then he tilted his head towards the telegram as the other two each took an identical chair around the matching white iron table. "Good news?"
Quatre blinked at the telegram, which he hadn't hardly glanced at yet. He tore into the envelope, stamped with the insignia of the local telegraph office, and quickly examined the contents. "...it's from home!" he exclaimed. The other two looked at each other and leaned in to hear the rest. "Rashid says the fighting seems to have stopped! The last two of my sisters who were so fixated on winning the tontine both died last week."
Trowa laid a hand on Quatre's arm without a thought. "I'm so sorry," he said right away. "Who's left now?"
"The ones who value the strength of our family more than money," Quatre answered, preparing to read further. "It seems the final pair who couldn't rid themselves of avarice had something of a showdown after one tracked the other down in a village north of our ancestral home. There was a fight...something about a street brawl...but before the locals could pull them apart, one of them was stabbed." He turned to the second page, already paling. "She died before anyone could get her to a doctor."
"What about the other girl?" Heero asked.
"...strange...this says she escaped the crowd and fled the village on horseback...but she was less than a mile down the road when the horse went mad and ran straight into a fifty-foot gorge." Quatre put the telegram down slowly, staring ahead and slightly down at nothing. "The horse must have smelled the blood on her hands and gotten spooked...but why wait until they were so far out of town?"
Trowa folded his arms thoughtfully and solemnly. "He realized he was all alone with a murderer..."
Heero glanced back and forth between the two of them, not unsympathetically, but anxious to get to the more crucial business. "Where does that leave the status of the tontine?"
"Well...several of us are still missing, including Nadia," Quatre said. "She's the oldest...and she also has her husband and children to think about. They could be captured, they could be just hiding. Rashid will do his best to make contact with the other survivors, and if they're all accounted for, we'll know Hassan doesn't yet have a way to collect his 'winnings.' If he was smart from the beginning, though, he would have taken someone before the fighting even began." He folded the pages back up and tapped the corner of the tidy package on the trellis-like table top. "I don't know how I'm going to get out of here to tell Yasmeen and the others. This house feels more like a prison every day, but I can't quit any more than Duo can. We both need the money to help our loved ones, in one way or another."
"I can pass along a message until you can get away," Heero offered.
Quatre handed him the telegram with a grateful smile. "I'd appreciate that."
"As urgent as this is," Trowa added, "it's not going to make it any easier for us to sneak out to do anything about it. The fellow who took over your job makes us sign a chart when we want to leave the property, putting down where we're going, why, and how long we'll be gone, and there's a two-hour time limit!"
Quatre made a distasteful noise and shook his head. "You'd think he gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of locking us up with Tristan all day!"
"Yeah!" Trowa chuckled bitterly.
Heero fell silent. ".....Tristan? ...Tristan's real?"
Quatre blinked at him again. "Of course he's real. What did you think?"
".....um..." He wasn't sure anymore. When Duo brought him horror stories about Tristan the Bottom-Pinching Octopus, Heero assumed that, despite Duo's committment to truthfulness, he just invented the boy as part of some charmingly juvenile plot to make him jealous, but if Tristan was real, perhaps the threat he posed was also real. Maybe if Heero didn't supply Duo with all the affection he needed, he really would be able to find it somewhere else. "...nothing, I must have misunderstood, that's all," Heero blurted, standing up. "I should go find Duo."
"Be careful," Quatre reminded him as he crept up on the door.
Heero opened the wooden slab a crack, peered down the hall, then glanced back at the others slyly. He couldn't let on to anyone that he had just been hurled face-first into a relationship crisis. "I'm always careful."
**********Duo puzzled and puzzled all the way upstairs. Who could possibly be so interested in seeing him, especially given the mood he was in lately? Buried just a thumbnail-scratch beneath his kind, calm surface was a boiling hot fire that he was unable to quench on his own. The flames licked at him from the inside out, scorching his skin in places where he could never reach. Every second that his heart continued to beat, he needed Heero twice as much as before, and he couldn't imagine any visitor who could take his mind off his maddening physical thirst.
As he rounded the corner into the little nook off the dining room, with the tiny wobbly table and the cupboards whose doors hung shakily on their hinges, the world turned upside down in an instant. Standing in the middle of what used to be Heero's only personal realm in the house, back turned and looking at the wine rack, was a woman in a pale blue dress with a long blonde braid hanging down below a wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with fresh flowers. Hearing movement behind her, she turned around, and a delicate heart-shaped face with a healthy, peaches-and-cream shine lit up with glee upon seeing Duo. Duo's jaw dropped, but he quickly picked it back up, grinning and laughing as he rushed forward and captured Helen in a giant bear hug. Helen hugged back just as hard, her strength restored at last, and let a few joyous tears escape unchecked. "Ohhh...me darlin'...me sweet, sweet darlin'!" she cried as they squeezed each other tightly. "How good it is to see you."
"You too!" With one last hug, Duo stepped back, still holding both of her soft hands, and gazed wide-eyed at how strong she seemed. "You look fantastic!"
"I've got you to thank for that," she said in her lovely Irish lilt. "You and your fine doctor friend. I never would have gotten well again without you both."
Duo let go of her hands and wiped what he was sure must have been a half-inch of sweat off his brow. "I can't get over this...I'm just in shock! I didn't know you were coming, much less that you weren't sick anymore!"
"I wrote you a letter to say I was coming to London, didn't you get it?"
Then and only then did Duo remember the letter he consciously chose not to read, because he was tired of Helen harping about his oh-so-sinful life. He couldn't let her know that he had practically thrown the letter away, but he couldn't lie either. He split the difference, and just hugged her again. "Oh, never mind! You're here! That's what really matters." The truth spoke for itself. Sure, Helen got on his nerves when she started getting all preachy with him, but he loved her like his own mother, if he could imagine what it felt like to have one. Oddly, he couldn't imagine forgetting about Heero either, but that happened too.
**********Early on in his struggles, Heero briefly considered hiding within Bridlewood's walls like Wufei once did, sleeping in a three-foot-wide niche on a bare wood floor and only coming out at night to hunt for scraps of food. He dismissed the idea for several reasons, reasons which became excuses as time went on. All in all, it was simply too uncomfortable, too risky, too boring to be sitting in the wall all day and having no one to talk to all night, as Duo would always need his sleep for the following morning. He wondered how Wufei managed it, then wondered how he himself managed it through years of training. It seemed so long ago now.
Otto may have had the police on his side, but Heero had the advantage of having memorized the entire layout of the mansion to tolerances of an inch or less, and he felt he knew his way around even better than the house steward did. He knew exactly where to stand in order not to be seen by a particular angle in particular lighting, and he knew where anyone was likely to stand in any place from the wear patterns on the floor. In this way, Heero crept up behind a tallish man in a long-tailed coat and white gloves without being noticed. The way he carried himself suggested arrogance, among other things, and that plus Duo's description made it a safe bet that this gentleman was the new butler. Heero was hiding across the hall from him, just inside a doorway, and he could have easily scooted past to get to the kitchen and deliver the bag of sweets to Duo, but for some strange reason which he couldn't figure out, he wanted to get a good look at the guy. Maybe it was envy, or maybe insecurity, but he would possibly never know, because no sooner had he begun a detailed distance inspection of the man than an interruption broke his rhythm of cognition.
"Sir! Sir!" The frantic call of a female voice prompted Heero to flatten himself back against the wall. Outside in the hall, pudgy Pearl and horse-faced Grace were running up to Bertram Augustus in a most untoward fashion. They were obviously in a state about something, and skidded to a halt just as the butler turned around to peer disapprovingly at them both.
"What is it?" he asked in a starchy tone.
"We've seen that prowler again, sir!" Pearl said loudly, gesturing at the general direction of the exterior wall Heero skirted along on his way in.
"...prowler," Grace echoed in a soft, gormless voice, grinning stupidly as if she invented prowlers in a previous life.
The butler frowned and leaned forward with his hands clasped behind him. "Was it definitely the same one?"
Pearl nodded emphatically. "Oh, yes sir! Not too tall, dark hair, but diff'rent clothes this time." She then rubbed her hands together nervously and looked down at the floor. "We...we wasn't sure whether or not you believed us last time, so we've been discussin' whether to tell you since it 'appened..."
"...happened," Grace echoed again.
"How long ago did you see him?"
"Ooh, not more than twenty minutes, I'm sure, sir," Pearl went on. "I spotted 'im from the window, an' we both watched him dive 'round the back and disappear!"
Heero wanted to beat his head against the wall. He was sure he hadn't seen any faces in the window when he did his security check before dashing between the south wall and the hedge, but perhaps he just hadn't looked hard enough. A tiny peek out from behind the door frame revealed the answer--Pearl had a very dark complexion, and Heero had expected to see pale, pasty faces in the windows, if there were any. His own fault. Now these two housemaids knew he was lurking about the property, and they had just told the head of the household as well. If Otto found out, he was cooked.
"This is quite serious. I shall telephone the police at once." Bertram Augustus started toward the north hall, but paused to look sternly down at the girls. "You should have come to me with this immediately, do you understand? By arguing amongst yourselves, you may have given the prowler valuable extra time. Now...back to your duties."
Pearl lowered her gaze and curtseyed quickly. "Yes, sir, thank you, sir," she said before turning around and attempting to walk away, but Grace was still grinning at the butler as if she had no idea the conversation had ended on a disciplinary note. Pearl walked back a few paces, grabbed Grace by the arm, and pulled her away. Bertram Augustus twitched his moustache and went to telephone the police.
At that point, Heero decided to high-tail it to the kitchen before things went any further downhill. The butler went one way, the housemaids went the other way, and Heero nipped straight up the middle, into an empty hallway. It was a pity that there was no direct hallway between the greenhouse and the kitchen, because it forced him to loop around the service passage that connected the north and south halls behind the grand staircase at the front. This took him quite close to the dining room, which he never intended to visit, but he heard something familiar coming from that general direction that made him pause and draw nearer.
"...know you're settled here, but...I worry about you so very much." There was a woman's voice coming from somewhere. The dining room was empty, he observed, so he crept up on the swinging door to the butler's pantry and gave a listen.
"You don't have to worry! I'm perfectly fine!" a second voice said.
Duo? Squinting, Heero leaned back and looked at the door oddly. Who's in there with you?
"It's your soul I'm concerned with, Duo," the woman's voice said, and it finally clicked into Heero's memory. The voice was Helen. It sounded much stronger than it did when he was sitting outside her bedroom on the top floor of a townhouse in Ireland while she and Duo caught up on life in general. "After all you've been through, I wouldn't ordinarily begrudge you a few friends, but I wish you could have chosen them more carefully. You're startin to establish yourself in the world now...you could have the same life anyone else your age is entitled to. A wife, and children, and a home of your own...please, I don't want you go go spoilin' it all for the sake of some misguided...infatuation."
Heero couldn't see it through the door, but Duo looked absolutely mortified. This was exactly what he was afraid of most. Even though he never really told Helen how he felt about Heero, somehow she knew, and she wasn't going to let up until she converted Duo back to the way of righteousness. She wasn't doing it to be mean, far from it, but it was irritating and scary nonetheless. He turned quite pale. "...what are you saying?"
Helen gazed sadly at her little potato dumpling, almost all grown-up. She reached out and stroked his cheek lightly. "I want you to come home with me...to Ireland."
Duo lost his voice. A moment later, Helen made a sympathetic sound and stepped forward to embrace him. He couldn't return it. He was frozen, staring over her shoulder at the wine rack, counting the bottles and not knowing why. "Swell," he said quietly. There was no medical explanation for the total loss of feeling in his arms and legs.
Heero backed away from the other side of the door, reaching a shaky hand behind him until he made contact with the nearest chair around the dining room table. Whatever training in psychology he had accumulated that he could still remember was failing him, badly. Why wasn't Duo telling her that leaving London was out of the question? It was out of the question, wasn't it? Had he changed his mind about something? About everything? Was he going to leave? Was it too late to stop him, after being so wishy-washy on the subject of physical intimacy for so long? Had Duo finally given up? A ringing started up in Heero's ears, first one, then the other. Dizziness followed. Rejection was imminent. Escape was necessary. He didn't understand why it was necessary, but he needed it all the same.
Just as soon as the paper bag of sweets in his pocket crunched against the back of the chair, he found his legs again, and walked swiftly out. The first window he saw, he leapt out of, and he was around the corner and gone in a flash.
~~~~~~~~~~
Next, in Episode Eighty-Three: CRISIS!! A choice must be made while a grand love hangs by a thread. Duo struggles not only with moral issues but also with his mixed loyalties, while Heero asks himself how much is too much to sacrifice for an uncertain friendship.
Wow...two whole years. When I started this thing, I had no idea it would be going on as long as this...but all good things must (at least) come to an intermission, and the clock is ticking. (Don't panic, we've still got some time left, enough to see what happens with regards to... =^_^= ...but then if I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise, would it?) Next episode will be June 4th...and DON'T go anywhere that day. =^_~=