It had been nearly a year since that day when the young Arabian youth had found the injured American boy and brought him home. It had been just a few weeks after that when those two teenagers had developed a relationship with each other. To most of the family's friends, the two seemed brothers to each other and technically they sort of were. Quatre's father had adopted the American so that he would have to be sent too a boarding home. Though to those the two boys knew at school, they were a couple, and a cute one at that. The quiet little blonde boy and the longhaired youth were never seen apart from each other. Everyone knew that Duo Maxwell and Quatre Winner were together – not everyone knew the darker side of things though.
Duo had always been grateful to the Winner family, especially Quatre. Quatre had been the one who had found him bruised and battered, bleeding and naked in the ally that cold October night. Quatre had been the one to come over, see if he was even alive as well as been the one to call the hospital. The Winners, when they found out the young American man they'd found was an orphan, paid for all his medical care. They bought him clothes, gave him a home. More importantly, for the first time in his life, Duo felt wanted, felt loved. The Winners had been the ones that taught the boy to trust again; they had been the ones that showed him not everyone he met was going to hurt him.
Quatre had been shocked that night to see that body curled up in the back of a dead-end alley. He saw the blood, saw the rags of cloth around, he wasn't even sure what had made him go over to what had seemed a dead person – and an ugly sight at that. The boy had been unconscious when the blonde knelt down next to him. The thing he remembered most vividly about it was the moment he had cleaned the other's face off with a rag dampened from his water bottle, he was shocked at how beautiful the face underneath the dirt and grim had been. He remembered so clearly the fear in Duo's bright, violet eyes when he had woken in the hospital with Quatre and his family standing around the bed. He remembered the long process it took to get the boy to trust again.
But that was all in the beginning, Quatre and Duo became closer and closer, they became brothers, then friends, maybe a little more than that. Things seemed to all be going well for a while, until about a year after the night that had brought them together. Duo had met someone as they both moved into a new high school. The private school they had previously attended had closed and Quatre's father decided to put the boys into a public high school. Well, Duo liked this person he had met, and Quatre didn't take to well to that.