Title: Never Turn Your Back on the Sea (13/?)
Section Title: Confrontations
Author: Alleyprowler
Pairings: 3x4, 1xR, 2xH
Rating: R for language

Summary: Wufei angsts, Trowa infiltrates, Heero eavesdrops, and Relena gets creeped out. Apologies in advance to any arachnophobes who may be reading.

Notes: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, and double thanks for anyone who has been kind enough to overlook the borked formatting in the first couple of incarnations of this chapter. I think it's fixed now. You guys are are awesome and splendid and lickable. Enjoy!

The raveled sleeve of care refused to be knit by sleep. The previous evening, Wufei could have sworn he would fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow and stayed that way for the next eight hours, but in spite of the wine Duo had insisted upon at dinner, sleep came only slowly and fled for good a scant few hours later.

It seemed Quatre's bad nerves were contagious. Of course, Wufei couldn't blame him for being jumpy. How else was one supposed to react to the fact one's ex-lover had come halfway across inhabited space and infiltrated what was one of the most secure buildings in the LaGrange point for the sole purpose of leaving cryptic notes in one's lunch? That was not normal behavior, as Quatre had pointed out. Wufei concurred, but that wasn't what kept him up most of the night in a state of low-grade panic, tossing and turning in the unfamiliar bed.

Dawn was beginning to lighten the curtains, and he was still and staring at the ceiling, asking himself the question that had haunted him for most of his life. Did I do the right thing?

He couldn't answer that question, and by the time the artificial dawnlight began to cycle from pearl grey to pink, he'd given up even pretending he was going to get any sleep.

Wufei had an excellent memory under ordinary circumstances, but the events of that day six weeks ago had an almost cinematic clarity to them that he found a little eerie.

He could hear his own voice as he began to tell Yates his rights. He could smell the wrenched blend of chemicals in the tainted soil. He remembered how he had tried to make his breathing as shallow as possible because nothing that smelled that bad could be healthy. He saw the plummy color Yates had turned and felt a twinge of mingled rage and remorse about how he had wished the man dead.

Everything had gone so neatly till then; it was 'a righteous cop', to put it in the current vernacular. And it had been righteous, if not exactly textbook-standard. He'd been well within his rights to restrain and detain both Ervy and Yates. But then the unthinkable had happened and Yates had caught him off-guard, and that's when all hell had broken loose.

"I was supposed to be in charge," Wufei told the ceiling. He rubbed the phantom ache on the right side of his jaw. It had healed weeks ago, but the quality of this memory was so vivid that he felt it throbbing and aching as if the injury had happened yesterday.

He had been in charge till then, but one lucky blow had knocked him down and temporarily removed him from the equation, and that was when his righteous cop...suddenly wasn't exactly righteous. He didn't blame Duo for shouting out a warning or Quatre for firing his gun; those two were incapable of standing idly by in a crisis, which is why he had allowed them to help in the first place. No, the responsibility was his alone. If someone had to take the fall, it was him.

The phone rang, startling him out of his ruminations, and he rolled over to answer it. "What is it?"

A robotic voice rapped out: "Wake-up call, sir. Court proceedings begin in an hour and a half, so please be in the seventh floor conference room by then or risk a fine of up to five hundred credits or five days in prison if you cannot afford the fine. Have a nice day."

"Wait a minute--what?"

"Be in the conference room by oh-nine-thirty. Good day, sir," said the voice, and the receiver went dead.

Wufei threw his arm over his eyes and let out a slow, mournful sigh. Right or wrong, it was time to face the music.

When Quatre woke, he felt deliciously warm and secure. He hadn't woken up feeling that way in ages, and it took his sleepy brain a few seconds to realize that there was someone in the bed with him, holding him from behind. A warm body, someone comfortable, someone who clung to him securely but not possessively, someone...

Someone who shouldn't have been there.

Quatre practically exploded off the bed, scattering sheets, blankets, pillows and his bedmate to the floor. "What the hell!" he yelled, casting around the dim, unfamiliar room for a lamp, a letter opener, anything that could be used as a weapon.

"Christ, Quatre, that was a rude awakening," a voice complained from the other side of the bed. Moving slowly and clutching his head with one hand, Duo Maxwell rose to his feet.

Quatre took a breath and tried not to crumple to the floor in an undignified heap. "Duo, you have five seconds to explain what you were doing in my bed before I fall over dead from a heart attack."

"You've been so damn jumpy and I hate sleeping alone," Duo said with a shrug. "It seemed like the thing to do. And you can't have a heart attack, the trial is beginning today."

"Fine, I'll take a rain check," Quatre said, and in truth, his heartrate was starting to slow down to a more normal level. He took another breath and looked around for a clock. "What time is it, anyway?"

Duo picked the alarm clock up off the floor and replaced it on the nightstand where it belonged. "It's time to get up. I'm going to head back to my room and shower, why don't you order us some breakfast and coffee? Decaf for you. You're too damn twitchy as it is," he said and stalked off.

He was suddenly glad that he was confined to the seventh floor, and grateful for the armed guards who stood at every possible entrance. What had seemed like a pointless attempt to keep them isolated within the building now seemed to be a perfectly reasonable course of action. No one was let in, and no one was let out without being scrutinized within an inch of their life.

But then again, this was Trowa they were talking about.

The phone rang. Quatre nearly jumped out of his skin. For a moment the shrill bell had sounded like breaking glass and his mind had supplied a brief but vivid image of the window in the lounge area bowing inward and showering shards of glass all over the carpet and furnishings. Then the phone rang again and he realized he was having another attack of twitchiness.

"It's just the phone, you idiot," he muttered to himself, and went to pick it up. "Yes, hello?"

"Wake-up call," said an unpleasant voice in a bored drawl.

"I didn't ask for a wake-up call."

"You get one anyway. I'm also supposed to let you know that court proceedings begin in an hour and a half, so please be in the seventh floor conference room by then or risk a fine of up to five hundred credits or five days in prison if you cannot afford the fine. Have a nice day."

"You have a nice day, too," Quatre said, but the unpleasant person had already hung up and couldn't hear the snarl of sarcasm in his voice. Have a nice day, indeed. It was barely full light outside and already Quatre wanted to crawl back into bed and start over.

But the situation was bigger than him and his personal desires, so he picked up the phone again, ordered breakfast for three, and headed for the bathroom to see if a hot shower could salvage his mood.

"Hey, new guy!"

The prep cook, who went by 'Tom' and was thoroughly sick of being called 'new guy' instead, looked up from the pile of scallions he had been chopping and attempted to place a pleasant expression on his face. "What is it, Carlos?"

Carlos was redder and sweatier than Tom had ever seen him before, and red and sweaty was the norm in such a hot and busy place as the Judicial Administrative Building's kitchens. He was practically staggering under the weight of a large tray, but Tom didn't think that was the sole reason that the vein running down the center of Carlos's forehead looked like it might actually explode. "It's the goddamn dumbwaiters. The things have worked like magic for the twenty years I've been here and then this morning--boom!--they won't budge!"

Thirty seconds with a screwdriver and a couple of toothpicks had seen to that, but Tom wasn't about to divulge that little tidbit of information. "I'm sorry to hear that. How can I help?"

"You could fix the damn thing," Carlos said, and Tom felt the blood drain from his face. Had he been caught? But he'd been so careful...

"Naw, just joking!" Carlos said with an explosive laugh. "I know you ain't a mechanic. Look, just hoof this order of cross-ants and eggs up to the seventh floor, willya? I'll call Maintenance later on."

Tom took the tray with a nod. "Don't I need security clearance for that particular floor?"

"I gotcha covered in one phone call," Carlos said with a wink. "I'm the kitchen manager, kid. I got more pull around here than old Crothbauer himself!" And he walked off into the steam, laughing loudly.

There was a light, quick rap on Quatre's door, and he rolled his eyes at his image in the mirror and pulled his toothbrush out of his mouth. It had to be Wufei. Duo was more of a barger than a knocker, and besides, he was probably still busy doing whatever it was he did to his hair. "Come on in, it's unlocked!" he called out.

He rinsed his mouth, dragged a comb through his damp hair and shrugged his way into a fresh shirt. He wondered if the situation called for a necktie. He didn't think so, but had brought a couple, just in case. "Wufei? Do you think I'll need to wear a tie?"

"Probably not," replied a voice that wasn't Wufei's.

Quatre froze in the act of buttoning his shirt. His heart skipped one beat, two beats, and then began to pound against his ribs like a jackhammer. He knew that voice.

With fingers suddenly gone ice-cold, Quatre opened the bathroom door. He took a step into the sitting room without taking his hand off the doorknob, prepared to bolt if things got even remotely weird. His ears had to be playing tricks on him; there was no way the owner of the voice could belong to who he thought it belonged to. Trowa?

There was a breakfast cart in the sitting room. The young man attending it was lean and handsome, dressed in crisp chefs whites. His hair was slicked back from his brow and secured under a brimless white cap, and his eyes were partially screened behind a pair of black-framed spectacles. It was a simple disguise, but an effective one, and for a split second the part of Quatre's brain that lived in denial convinced him that the man was a stranger. But then Trowa looked at him and smiled that smile and the illusion was shattered. "Good morning."

Quatre's grip on the doorknob tightened. "How did you...?" Manage to infiltrate the staff, get clearance for this floor, get past the guards...Quatre didn't quite know how to finish the sentence, even if he'd been safely able to. The day before, he, Duo and Wufei had found two microlens cameras in the sitting room, one in the bedroom, and a couple of tiny parabolic microphones hidden in the ornate curlicues of a couple of picture frames. A very circumspect debate over whether or not to disable them had broken out, but in the end Quatre had vetoed it. They could do what they liked in their own suites, but he didn't want to mess with anything in his suite if he didn't have to.

He was now regretting that decision.

"There was an unfortunate mechanical failure with the dumbwaiter system this morning, sir," Trowa said.

Quatre just bet there was. Mindful of the bugs, he mouthed, "I cannot believe you. Do you know how much trouble you could get into if you get caught?"

"I don't care." Trowa's expression went solemn. "I had to get in touch with you, Quatre. I know this is crazy and dangerous, but I had to. Please," he whispered, pulling an envelope out of his pocket, "will you read this?"

He started to take a step toward Quatre, but Quatre held up his hand in a 'halt' gesture. "Put the envelope on the sideboard."

A look of pure hurt flashed across Trowa's face, but he nodded and set the envelope down beside the breakfast dishes. "Will you read it?"

"I'll read it, I promise. You'd better go before the guards get suspicious." And before Wufei and Duo show up, he added to himself.

"Thank you. That means a lot," Trowa said. He smiled a small, sad smile and made a subtle but unmistakable transformation into an anonymous kitchen helper once again. "Enjoy your breakfast, sir," he added out loud, and then he walked away.

Duo didn't know who looked worse: Quatre, who looked like he might just jump out of his skin if someone made too sudden a move toward the sugar bowl, or Wufei, who was pale and rumpled and looked like he had aged at least fifty years overnight.

Yeah, okay, so maybe this place wasn't the honeymoon suite at the Hilton-Grand, and they were not here on a well-deserved vacation, but it wasn't that bad. The rooms were clean, if dull. They were safely guarded. There was some entertainment to be found. The food was decent and plentiful and virtually free. Yes, there was the whole trial thing, but that was in the future and Duo had practically developed an entire philosophy about not stressing about the future, because you really never knew what was going to happen in the next five seconds, let alone the next five years, and besides, the things you dread the most might be blessings in disguise. They might be monumentally devastating, on the other hand, but that was beside the point. The point was you just cannot know how things are going to come about till they come about, so why worry?

He spread some more blackberry jam on the end of his croissant and took a bite. "Eat up, guys. Don't let all this good food go to waste," he said, motioning toward the breakfast spread on the sideboard.

"I'm not really hungry," Quatre said, and at the same time, Wufei said, "I just want coffee."

Duo swallowed his mouthful. He chased it with a sip of juice and aimed a hard look at Wufei, then at Quatre. "What's wrong with you two? We've got twenty minutes to show up that the conference room and we won't get a chance to eat till God knows when. I am not going to sit in a stuffy little room with you two and listen to your stomachs making those disgusting gurgly sounds all morning because you skipped breakfast. Now either eat or tell me the reason why not."

Duo was gratified when Wufei picked up a croissant and nibbled the end of it, but then he was mystified when, a few seconds later, Wufei spat the masticated pastry into his palm and looked squarely at Quatre. "You take care of the eyes," he said, and rose from his chair.

"Okay." Quatre stuck his forefinger into the pat of butter Duo had been using and rolled it around till the fingerpad was well-coated. He rose and started to move toward the door.

The pastry went dry in Duo's throat. "Uh, guys? If this is some sort of weird sexual ritual, I don't really want to know about it...although Hilde might. Why don't you just sit down and eat and you can write it all down later, okay?"

They did not answer. Wufei went to a slightly faded print of a bowl of fruit and stuck his half-chewed croissant into a feather of scrollwork at the bottom of the frame. Duo looked over his shoulder and saw that Quatre had climbed up on top of a small desk near the door and was running his buttery finger over a section of beading that ran just under the ceiling. Wufei came back to the table, took another bite of croissant, chewed, and spat. Quatre jumped down from the table and re-coated his finger in butterfat.

It suddenly occurred to Duo what they were doing, and he frowned. "Did something happen? Are you guys okay?"

"I'm all right," Quatre said, coming back from the bedroom, where he had presumably been blinding the microlens in the molding with butter.

"I'm exhausted, but I'll live," Wufei said, settling himself back in his chair.

"Trowa was here," Quatre said, apropos of nothing as far as Duo could tell.

"Well, yeah, I saw the note." Duo wondered when Quatre had gotten into the habit of re-stating the blatantly obvious.

"No, I mean he was here, in this room. He brought breakfast."

Wufei stopped in the act of bringing a forkful of scrambled eggs to his mouth and glared at his food suspiciously. "He brought this?"

"Relax, Wufei, poison isn't his style," Duo said. Wufei's natural paranoia seemed to increase proportionally to the amount of sleep he had missed, and right now his nerves were probably on red alert. That didn't mean he wasn't acting ridiculously.

"I'm not worried about poison," Wufei snapped, "I'm worried about strangling to death on a love letter."

Even Quatre laughed a little at that. "Don't worry, it's on the sideboard this time."

"How did he get up here? Nobody's allowed on this floor."

"I don't know," Quatre said, mangling his eggs with a fork. "He was wearing chef's whites and black-framed glasses and he had his hair pulled back under a white cap. He had his security badge tucked into a pocket in his tunic so I couldn't see what kind of border it had, but since the guards left him alone, I'd assume he has some kind of clearance for this floor."

"So you're saying he can pretty much come and go as he pleases?" Duo asked. His opinion of the building's security went down several notches.

"I don't think so," Quatre said. "He said something about an 'unfortunate mechanical failure' with the dumbwaiters. Maybe it took him some time to pull it off."

Duo thought that was the richest thing he had heard in a long time. "Oh man, if you want something broken properly, find a mechanical genius. What do you want to bet they won't find the problem till we're long gone?"

Wufei didn't find it quite so amusing. "That's a little unsettling. If you want some time to think, you could switch rooms with one of us," he suggested.

"No. What good would that do? There are only so many rooms on this floor and he can be as patient as anything when it suits him. Besides, it's not like he's out to hurt me or anything."

"What does the note say?" Wufei asked.

Duo glanced at the paper on the sideboard, then at Quatre, who looked slightly uncomfortable. "I'd rather not talk about it now. I'm still processing."

Wufei nodded and set his plate down on the serving cart. "All right, we don't have time anyway. Meet in the conference room in five minutes."

Heero's workshop was normally locked up tight, which was just fine with Relena. She didn't like to go in there anyway. It was always unpleasantly cold in there even on the hottest days, and she thought the concrete floors, lack of windows, and wire-strewn steel walls were ominous. Everything echoed in there since there were no soft surfaces to absorb sound. The lighting was dim, reduced to isolated pools over whichever piece of equipment Heero was currently working on. Walking into the workshop was like stepping into some futuristic but dilapidated electronic warehouse, only without the rats.

He'd wanted her to be there at eleven-hundred hours, so here she was, three minutes early, standing just inside the thick steel door with a small swarm of things that looked like robotic spiders crawling over her shoes, presumably checking her for contraband.

"H-Heero?" she called out, grimacing with disgust as the traction-pads on the spiders' little feet crept over her ankles. Heero didn't answer.

"Oh, God," she whispered as the creepy little gizmos began to claw their way up her sheer stockings. The sticky little feet weren't sharp, but the cold footprints felt like pinpricks, and poisonous ones, at that. "Heero? Are you there?"

She had left the door open behind her. She could still escape, only her legs wouldn't move save for a faint trembling as the spiders swarmed over her calves and knees. She wanted to brush them away, but her hands seemed to be frozen into tight fists at her sides.

She wasn't afraid of spiders. She knew they held a very important place in the ecosystem. They ate flies and mosquitoes and other insects that might be vectors for disease. Their silk could be processed into paper and textiles. Their venom--when they were venomous, which was rare--was used in medical research and had been instrumental in curing many autoimmune disorders. They were good creatures, beneficial creatures...

And they were crawling up under her skirt.

"Heero!"

Faintly, she heard a toilet flush. A trapezoid of light appeared at the far end of the shop as a door opened. "What's going on?"

She was not panicking. She was not panicking. She was not panick...oh, hell. "Heero, the spiders!"

"Shit!" he said, and then there was a sharp whistle, the kind of whistle a dog trainer might make when he wanted his charges to come to heel.

Hundreds of tiny feet in sets of eight began to make their way downward from Relena's thighs to her calves, to her ankles in a calm exodus. Each one now had a single dim light on its back flashing green, and she watched in amazement as they formed two perfectly straight lines and began to march toward her husband in an orderly fashion.

"I'm sorry, Relena, I should have warned you," Heero said. In the dim light, she could barely see his white shirt as he moved from the bathroom to his work chair. "They are harmless, you know."

"I-I know," she said. She felt a cold trickle of sweat roll down her ribs. "I just wasn't expecting..."

"Spiders? Yeah, they weren't my first choice." Heero switched on a gooseneck lamp near himself and bent over with his elbows on his knees. The closest of the spiders began to crawl over his shoes.

"Your first choice of what?"

"Roaming bug models. I thought cockroaches might be a more universal model, but each time I tried to field test them, they got smashed. Spiders seem to be more...user-friendly." He smiled, and his teeth glowed an eerie purple-white from an ultraviolet light wand on his desk.

Relena sagged with relief as the last of the silvery creepy-crawlies left the toe of her left shoe. "What are they supposed to do?" she asked, crossing her arms across her breast and cupping her elbows in her palms.

"It depends on what the client wants. So far, they can sniff out certain chemical compounds, act as metal-detectors, or be used as listening devices. I'm trying to develop one that can deliver small cargo packets, but so far they aren't very smart at taking direction. They just sit where they're told or move toward the nearest source of infrared radiation."

Heero's hands were now full of tiny flashing green lights. Spiders.

"So that's why you invited me here? To test these...spiderbots?"

"Spiderbots? Spiderbots." Heero ruminated over that for a while. "That's a good term. I like it." He turned aside and deposited his creations into a cardboard box on the table. "No, I didn't invite you here for that. Why don't you take a seat?"

Relena found that her legs, while still a bit shaky, would move under her own will again, and she crossed a bare expanse of concrete to sit down on a lab stool near Heero. "So why did you ask me here?"

Heero smiled. "The picnic lunch is due in about half an hour, but in the meantime, I have something you might be interested in."

Relena hoped it wasn't seduction. Much as she loved him, she didn't fancy being taken in the midst of all these wires and boards and jars and retorts and, well, spyderbots. "What is it?"

He got up and began to rummage around in his strange workplace. "I think I told you about how Trowa asked me to get him a job in the L-2 Judicial Administration building," he said.

"Yes."

"Well, I did, but only on the condition that he took a couple of prototypes with him."

"You mean the spiders?"

"Yeah, the spiders--spiderbots. He helped me paint them so they looked like real spiders. Brown wolf spiders, to be precise. Harmless, useful, and ubiquitous."

"Yes, I know what they are. Go on."

"He smuggled them aboard--don't ask me how--and promised to plant them somewhere where the trial could be observed."

"The trial...Heero, that's a closed trial!"

"Yes," Heero said calmly. He set a black box and a set of headphones down on the table between them. "He succeeded satisfactorily. He put down two spiders in the conference room where Wufei, Quatre and Duo are watching it, and he said that he thought he'd managed to put one down in the Judicial Proceedings chamber itself, but he wasn't sure."

"My God..."

"And if I'm right," Heero pressed on, "the preliminaries should begin in a few minutes."

Relena was appalled. She looked at the box full of green-glowing spiders, then at the one Heero had set between them. Six years' worth of education in both Earth and Colony law flashed through her mind at high speed.

This was wrong. Very wrong. Yet, the only thing she could bring herself to say was, "Do you have another set of headphones?"

"Do we knock, or do we just go in?" Duo asked.

They were standing in the corridor, facing a door identical to all the other suite doors on the seventh floor, except this one was marked with a 'C' rather than a number. It was logical to assume it was the conference room. At least Quatre thought it was, but he'd had such a down-the-rabbit-hole morning that he wasn't fully trusting of his logic.

"Just knock," Wufei said, leaning wearily against the wall.

"Yeah." Duo raised his hand reluctantly and gave the door three sharp raps. Immediately, the door swung open, revealing a chamber that more closely resembled a private library than any conference room Quatre had ever seen. It also revealed a silver-haired woman with a hawklike face. She wore a navy blue quasimilitary uniform, and a service revolver hung from a leather holster over her left hip. Quatre blinked. It had been ages since he had seen someone carrying an unconcealed weapon. Even law-enforcement agents usually kept their arms concealed since it was currently not fashionable to acknowledge that such things might be necessary. This was after all, the era of pacifism.

"Badges, please" the woman said. A lean brown and black dog appeared at her side, and Quatre had to restrain an impulse offer his hand out for it to sniff. This was not a friendly-looking dog. This dog was trained to be all business; bureaucratic, efficient, ruthless when necessary. It would sooner snatch off his testicles than lick his hand, and since Quatre liked all of his appendages where they were, he simply stood at a safe distance and held out his security badge to the woman.

Duo had picked up the bad dog-vibes as well. He kept his mouth shut, held out his badge for inspection, then went into the conference room without even glancing at the beast. Wufei did the same, although he gave the dog an even wider berth. Wufei was mistrustful of dogs.

Apparently they had all passed some kind of test since the woman closed the door and turned to face them. "Have a seat, gentlemen. Council McInnes will be in shortly." She sat down in a straight-backed chair near the door, and the dog sat near her feet, vigilant and alert.

Quatre looked around the room and saw that the most comfortable-looking chairs had been arranged in an arc facing a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. The books in them might even have been real, but Quatre wasn't interested enough to go check. He was having trouble concentrating on anything save for that morning's encounter with Trowa and the sheer oddity of it all, and the letter...

/I'm so sorry I hurt you, Quatre./

He shoved that thought aside and began to take note of his surroundings. The room was only slightly larger than his own, but it seemed to have the same basic floor plan and color scheme. In between the chairs and the bookcase, there was a cherrywood table with a pitcher of ice water and several glasses on it. On a smaller side table was a coffee machine, currently full, although Wufei was making eyes at it. He wondered if the coffee was as good as the stuff Trowa had brought them earlier.

/I'm sorry that I ran, but I want you to know it wasn't you I was running away from. Never you. If anything, I was trying to run away from myself./

There were two arched windows on the long wall of the room. They looked out over a different section of the colony than Quatre had from his own room, and a decidedly gloomier one. The view was comprised of short, squat industrial type buildings and taller but graceless housing towers. The thin strips of greenery in between the buildings and the roads were ugly, neglected.

/I was scared, Quatre. I can't tell you the number of times I had to leave the room because being close to you made me so scared that I was literally sick from it./

Was there a bathroom in this place? He didn't want to disturb the uniformed woman stationed at the door. The gun and the dog had unnerved him enough already. He saw a door, unmarked, near the table with the coffee pot on it and pushed it open. There was a sink, a mirror, a toilet and a small supply cabinet in there, everything polished to a high gloss and reeking of disinfectant. He pulled the door shut behind him and turned on the cold water tap.

/I'm sorry I was so distant with you. I felt like I had to pull myself away from you emotionally or I would lose control. I thought it would pass over time, but it only got worse, so as soon as you were well enough, I ran like a coward. I don't expect you to forgive me for that. God knows I'll never forgive myself./

There was no way to plug the drain in the sink, so Quatre stuffed a wad of paper towels in the hole and waited for the basin to fill with icy water before he turned it off.

/You were so calm. Even when I knew you were in pain, you were calm and smiling and trying to make the best of things. There were nights when you couldn't sleep, and you never let me know how tired you were, but I knew. I always knew, even though I'd hidden myself away in the guest room./

The water was shockingly cold on his face. He gasped reflexively, sputtered, and splashed himself again. His cuffs were getting wet, but he didn't care. They would dry.

/You never complained. It shamed me that you felt you had to act that way around me, though I don't know if things would have been better if you had. Maybe if you'd complained I would have had something to blame for acting like I did./

The soap was liquid, purple, and smelled of lilac. He didn't care for lilacs, but he washed his face with it anyway. It wasn't so bad. It made his skin feel oddly smooth, as if his face had been laminated with a thin coating of flexible plastic. It felt strange, but not unpleasant.

/It was like you had resigned yourself to fate. I think that's what scared me the most. You didn't seem to care if you lived or died, you were cheerfully accepting either way./

Quatre carefully pulled his makeshift plug from the drain and dried himself on a handful of paper towels. There was a tap at the door. "Yes?"

"If you're done with your bath, Council McInnes is here," said Duo.

Quatre tested his smile in the mirror. It was good enough. "I'll be right out."

/I'm not telling you this to upset you. I just wanted you to know that it wasn't your fault./

"Upset me," Quatre repeated with a quiet laugh. "No, I won't let you. I have a job to do."

He tugged on his cuffs, pulled his collar into shape and opened the door, prepared to play Quatre Raberba Winner to the hilt.

TBC