Gibraltar Barracks Room (the following morning)

A muzzy Dearka emerged from an erotic dream in which his hands held slender hips against his own. The delicious feeling of a warm responsive body pressed against the swelling in his crotch….

Reality exploded in a sequence of split-second flashes: realisation that he was awake; that he was indeed pressing a warm body against him; and that blazing anger was driving sleep from the face of Yzak Joule as he wrenched out of Dearka's clasp.

The next thing Dearka knew was Yzak's fist smashing into his face, while its owner screamed at him: "What the hell do you think you're doing? You stupid fuckwit! You and your pornographic dreams..." The words were accompanied by kicks, the second of which shot Dearka out of the bed, simultaneously catching him in the groin. He sank in agony on the floor, while Yzak knelt above him on the bed and raved. "You are dead, Elsman, dead!"

Feeling sick, Dearka croaked "I was dreaming about a girl! I'm a normal horny teenager. I can't be held responsible for what I do in my sleep, Yzak!"

"Arsehole! If you didn't read those bloody magazines all the time you wouldn't be this way."

Yzak swept into the bathroom; the blasting of the shower could be heard within seconds of his entrance. On the floor, Dearka gave way to a wracking fit of vomiting.

He was still sitting there with his back hunched against the bed, holding a hand over his eyes against the morning sun, when Yzak returned. Now neat and well-groomed in his red coat, he stood with his hands on his hips for a moment, looking down at the spectacle Dearka presented. His lip curled. "An appropriately sordid setting for you Elsman." He then stalked out without another word.

Dearka sat on the floor till enough of the pain had subsided and then got slowly to his feet.

He felt sick all over again as memory replayed the dream fragment and Yzak's reaction. How the hell had that happened? Yzak had looked so angry and….hurt?

Oh shit. How am I going to talk my way out of this?

Corridors

Yzak stalked in the direction of the mobile suit hangar. The scowl on his face ensured that nobody in the bustling corridors spoke to him, or encroached on his personal space. Not that he saw any of the people that he swept past; his mind was taken with trying to come to terms with what had happened in the room he shared with Dearka.

Or rather, used to share with Dearka. As would be the case as soon as he got an opportunity to have his accommodation changed. They could put him in a maintenance cupboard in his present frame of mind, and so long as it did not have Dearka Elsman in it, he would consider it luxurious.

The last thing he remembered was falling asleep beside Dearka after they had held each other. His face burned painfully now at that memory. It had felt so good to be held by him…

Yzak's pace slowed as he wrestled with unfamiliar and painful feelings. Just what did he truly feel for Dearka Elsman?

I love him. He had already acknowledged this in some part of his mind; the part with no words, just raw emotions. Now he dragged it into the light and set it in stone with words, at least those spoken in his own mind.

If he loved Dearka, it necessarily followed that he, Yzak, was gay. He tried the flavour of the word on his tongue. He had never thought of himself in those terms; he had never been attracted to a guy before. But you haven't been attracted to any girls, either, have you?

Pain and pleasure were so cross-wired in his brain, that the whole issue of sexual attraction had seemed irrelevant. Maybe at seventeen that wasn't normal, either. But not everybody started panting after the opposite sex from the age of twelve like Dearka had!

And right there was the central problem. Dearka Elsman was a girl-crazed arsehole. That meant this morning's little fiasco wasn't aimed at Yzak, just Dearka fantasizing about a girl, as he said. That simply compounded the humiliation. The bastard. And the worst of it was that Yzak had felt himself tightening with pleasure, reacting to the contact with Dearka's body, in that brief interval before he was fully awake and realised what was happening. Sick with rage, and desperate to get away, he'd fled into the shower…

How could they continue to share a room? The idea of separation from Dearka was painful. But what choice did he have? Bad enough, that as members of the same team, they would still have to work and fight together. With these new raw feelings, to continue to be around Dearka all the time was folly. He would do something to betray himself. Dearka was bright that way. Yzak's pace slowed to a crawl. He stared unseeing, at the floor. Could he function without Dearka after all these years?

Gibraltar Base Mess-Hall

Dearka sat sipping hot black coffee. The uneaten breakfast he kept on the table in front of him would ensure that he was left unmolested by the serving orderlies for some time yet. He needed time and caffeine to work out what had happened, and what he could do to fix it.

He tried to relive the events of the morning in as much detail as he could recall. He remembered waking up the first time: an unusual sense of well-being had told him that for once he had slept his fill. Somehow, on the Vesalius, there was never enough time for everything, and sleep was one of the first things sacrificed.

He could recall gazing drowsily at Yzak's pale arm lying across his chest. He'd remembered then that he was not on the Vesalius; he and Yzak were stuck on Earth.

He'd dreamily watched Yzak sleep beside him. The scar was hidden by the way he'd lay on his side. He'd looked beautiful, like a sleeping angel.

Dearka smiled into his now cooling coffee dregs; nobody who had the smallest acquaintance with the waking Yzak would ever be able to entertain that comparison, of course. It seemed a pity that looks like those should be wasted on a male.

That triggered another memory. He distinctly recalled lying there and thinking: You are so beautiful. If only you were a girl, Yzak…. Some time after that he had dozed off again.

So that's how I came to be dreaming like that? Was I dreaming of Yzak as a girl, or some girl as Yzak?

Dearka stared into his coffee cup. So, on some level he had known that it was Yzak there with him. Had the groundwork for this been laid when they were cuddling in bed last night? He had meant it as no more than an offer of simple comfort. Well, that is what he had been certain of at the time. The human mind was sneaky though, it could so easily lie to itself about motives for doing things. Am I attracted to Yzak?

At this singularly inopportune moment a shadow fell across him. Looking up, he found one of the mess-hall staff, deferential but determined. "I'm sorry, sir. We need to clear this table now." Dearka pasted a smile on his face, nodded, and made a hasty exit.

Barracks Room

He returned to the room though he did not have any real hope that Yzak would have come back. Sure enough, it was the same as he had left it: Yzak's still unmade bed, the damp patch where he had cleaned the floor, the condensation from his shower….

Dearka blinked. Another memory had lurched into focus. When he took his shower, there had been no residual warmth from the one Yzak took. No evidence of steam in the air. There should have been; the time interval between them was not great. There could only be one explanation. Yzak had taken a cold shower. Why? He was not in the habit of doing so. Shit. Had Yzak been aroused by what had happened between them, and killed the unwanted reaction with cold water? The more Dearka thought about the possibility, the more likely it seemed. Perhaps the dream memory of a responsive body had not been all just dream….

Dearka sat on the rumpled bed and ran his hands through his hair. Oh, Yzak. I think we are both getting into deep water here. I need to talk with you about this, very badly.

Dearka determined to go after Yzak and have a heart to heart talk with him. From long experience, he knew the default setting for Yzak's personality, when things were bad: after any big emotional upset (read temper tantrum), Yzak got an overwhelming need to plunge himself into single-minded hard work, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. The mobile suit hangar was therefore the most likely place where he could corner Yzak.

Mobile Suit Hangar

He ran his quarry to earth very easily, as Yzak was standing in front of the Duel, berating a mechanic about some minor error of maintenance that he had detected.

"Hey, Yzak. I need to talk with you."

Yzak looked stonily at him. "I don't have time to talk. You don't either. You should be working on the Buster."

"Yzak, we've got to sort this out. Come back to the room and let's discuss it. I think it's important."

The mechanic was still standing there, with the slightly glassy-eyed look of someone who didn't want to be acknowledged as being present. There was obviously some sort of fight brewing between those two and he wanted no part of it. All mobile suit pilots were a bit odd, but the silver-haired kid was downright scary.

Yzak abruptly snarled at the mechanic. "You – get the hell back to work. I'll talk to you later." The mechanic gratefully fled. He'd just noticed the bruise on the blonde one's jaw, and definitely didn't want to be around for whatever was going to happen next.

Yzak gave Dearka a long thoughtful stare. He suddenly seemed more resigned than angry, though Dearka wasn't sure how he knew this, as there was absolutely no clue in the other's expressionless face. "Right. We'll go and get this over with, shall we."

And with that Yzak strode off.

Dearka walked side by side with Yzak, as they retraced their steps back to the room where the trouble had all begun. Neither spoke. Yzak kept his gaze straight ahead, looking neither right nor left. Not so much as glancing at Dearka, who kept watching his profile, trying to work out what was going on in his mind. Dearka's palms were sweating as they approached the room. He had a terrible feeling that his whole relationship with Yzak might be riding on what passed between them in the next few minutes. And the thought of what might happen, that he might loose Yzak, sent a sick panic through him. Somehow they had to find a way to work through this…whatever it was….