Disclaimer - OK, they're not mine, I own no part of Gundam Wing and I'm doing this for the fun of it. No profit involved.

Snapshots and Memories:

Over a late breakfast, Wu and I had decided it might be best for Tro to have my room. It's on the ground floor with a separate entrance to the gardens, and it would give him a bit more space and privacy. It's also probably the tidiest room in the house, basically because I don't spend much time there.

None of us is domestically inclined; we do have a cleaning service that comes in every couple of weeks to blitz the place and in between we just switch rooms a lot. There are serious advantages to living in a big house.

We were currently almost at the end of a cleaning rotation, and I'd spent about an hour sorting through our few remaining clean sheets, trying to find a matching set of bed linen. I gave up in the end, reasoning that Trowa probably wouldn't mind that his duvet and pillow cases were gazillion-thread Egyptian cotton (don't ask me what that means) while the undersheet was flannel, with a pattern of dinosaurs.

Wufei was popping in and out, while I made up the bed, arranging scented candles on every available surface, and putting a little tray of Sanque chocolates on the pillows, once I'd fluffed them against the headboard, the way they do it in nice hotels.

I absently picked up on of the little foil wrapped truffles and bit into it.

'Duo! I left those for Trowa.'

'He wouldn't eat them, Wu. He only likes dark chocolate, remember?'

'Damn. I think Mil ate all the dark ones...do you think we should stop on the way to the airport?'

He caught my eye suddenly and we both burst out laughing.

'We're fussing way too much, aren't we?'

'Oh, yeah,' I snickered, 'like a couple of old grannies waiting for their one and only grandson to visit.'

'Or chambermaids on steroids! Still, at least I'm not the one who tied up a stack of Global Geographics with a ribbon,' Wu said darkly. 'Anyway, this all looks fine. You ready for lunch?'

'Give me a few minutes. I just want to get a few things..

I finished off the truffles (no point leaving them to go stale, after all), scrunched up the foil wrappings into a ball and toed it under the bed. Didn't think Tro was the type to check for dust bunnies. The room looked pretty nice actually; not as impersonal as a hotel, but enough of my stuff had been moved that Trowa wouldn't feel he was actually moving in on my personal space.

My dresser did look a bit cluttered actually, what with the stack of magazines Wu had been teasing me about (it was a tip I'd seen saw on a home decorating show; loose magazines look really messy if they're just strewn about, but package them up neatly and voila! You've got a nice little 'feature'), a couple of candles, an oil burner, and my two framed photographs.

I wasn't sure what to do about those actually, simply because Quatre was in both of them.

The first was of me and Quatre, back in the day when we were best friends, two kids caught up in fighting a war, caught up in falling in love.

We'd been lying low after a mission, just the two of us, and the safe house turned out to be an apartment smack in the middle of Toronto's gay village. Walking around was something of a revelation to us both, and it wasn't hard to persuade Quatre that we should go clubbing that night.

I think that day was the first time either of us had ever bought clothes for ourselves. Quat had all those older sisters who'd brought him up and they'd dressed him like a live doll, which went a long way toward explaining all those pastel outfits..

I'd had whatever rags I could scrounge on L2, sixth-hand hand-me-downs at the Maxwell Church and mission-appropriate clothing provided by G.

Neither of us had a clue what to get so we let the sales assistant choose for us. Once dressed up, we were apparently the cutest things he'd ever seen and Quat got him to take a photo of us.

It's still one of my most prized possessions. Quat is in faded jeans appliqued here and there with sparkly butterflies and a gauzy mesh top that was all the colours of the rainbow and then some. I'm going for a slightly less out-there look; fitted, black top and tight silver pants, laced up the sides, with a matching silver ribbon to weave into my braid. We look like a couple of regular teenagers, ready for a night on the razz.

At some point on the way back to the apartment, we'd ended up in an 'adult men's store'. Quatre was all wide-eyed curiosity, bouncing around like a kid let loose in a candy factory, not a clue what anything was, and I was trying to steer us away from the hardcore bondage stuff.

'What do you think these are, Duo?'

'They're, um, butt plugs'

'Really? And what are they for?' Shit, he was actually holding a couple like chopsticks, twirling them in one hand.

'For - ah, you know. For stretching.'

'Oh?' He had not got one freaking clue what I was talking about; just looking at me with that innocently enquiring gaze.

Oh fuck. I'd figured Trowa Barton was the sort of guy who'd been around the block a few times, before he blew it up, and that at some point he'd told Quat a few facts of life. Apparently not.

'OK. Quat, I think we need to have a little talk later this evening'

'Sure, Duo. If you like...oooh, what's this?'

We never made it to any clubs, which is probably just as well. We'd bought a bottle of gin earlier, using fake ID, and reasoned we could have a few drinks at home before heading out. Quat had some theory that colourless drinks didn't really make you drunk, just gave a nice buzz. God knows why I'd listened to the nice, Muslim boy, but my only experience with alcohol was occasionally finding beer cans with a few stale dregs left in the bottom, back on L2. I hadn't much liked the taste, and beer isn't even good for quenching thirst.

Anyway, Quatre was wrong about the gin. We'd had a couple of glasses each - and thrown it back up - before it was pretty obvious that we weren't going anywhere. Figuring that he was looking pretty green anyway, and we might as well get it over with, I took out the 'Bondage Toys 'R' Us' catalogue I'd snagged back in the store to have that little talk I'd promised.

Which didn't go very well. After another visit to the bathroom, Quatre staggered back into the room, announcing that he didn't think he was gay after all.

'But you love Trowa, don't you? You're always talking about him!'

'Of course I love him; it's just - I don't know that I can do those sort of things with the harnesses and the whips. I don't know how anyone could do that.'

'It's just the extreme stuff, Quat. Not everyone likes all that.' (Probably not the best time to say I had my suspicions about Trowa…)

The thing about Quatre was that pretty much all his ideas on love were based on the historical romances his sisters read, and I don't think they went into much detail about the physical stuff.

'Don't worry about it, Q, alright?' I reached out to give him a hug. 'You'll be fine, I promise.'

'Thanks, Duo,' he was perking up slightly. 'And I might never even have to do it. I mean we risk our lives on every mission, we could quite easily get killed or something.'

'Yeah, I guess.'

He got this dreamy look on his face then, and I could see he was imagining himself and Trowa dying in each other's arms, having made the ultimate sacrifice for the Colonies and living just long enough to declare their pure, undying love for one another. Oh, well, if it made him happy….

The photo's in this cheap little frame that I'd never got around to replacing and Quatre had sprawled BFF in the bottom corner.

The other photo is of the five of us during the war; the only one I have of us all together. A little out of focus because we'd used the auto timer on Quat's camera.

Quatre and I are in the forefront, grinning like loons; just your everyday teenage terrorists high on life and survival and the close physical presence of our respective boyfriends. We'd just got back from a mission, the two of us, and it had been brutal. I think only pure relief that we'd made it back had convinced the others to pose; they'd always refused before.

Trowa is directly behind Quat; most of his face is obscured by hair, but the visible part of his mouth is trembling into a slight smile. His arms are around Quatre's waist and Quat is sort of leaning into him.

Wufei is shoulder to shoulder with Tro, glaring at the camera as if it might be an OZ infiltrator. The four of us are bunched pretty closely together but Heero is just a little apart, not even making a pretence at posing for the birdie, gazing off somewhere to the right. I forgot now what he was even looking at; the Gundams probably. And behind my back, his right hand is clutching my braid. His talisman, his touchstone.

I do have other, better pictures of him, but I let myself keep this out because we're all there.

I took both pictures and left them, face down, at the very back of my closet.