Disclaimer - Not mine. All for fun. (although this chapter and the next one have felt more like penal servitude at times.!.)

A/N - This chapter started as little exercise for me to try to get inside Trowa's head and then got long enough to be posted in its own right. Trowa POV.

Lightning, in a Clouded Sky:

The French have a phrase for love at first sight - a coup de foudre. It can also mean a thunderbolt, or a flash of lightning across a clear sky, or an event that is entirely unexpected. My first sight of Quatre Winner was all of these things and more. A lightning bolt streaking between our Gundams and straight into my soul, a blaze of blue as his eyes met mine.

There is one other meaning for a coup de foudre. A disaster, unforeseen and wholly unanticipated.

But that isn't really fair. The clouds have been gathering for months, now. I could say it all went wrong when Quatre was almost assassinated. I saved him but it had been my fault. I'd let myself drop my guard at the wrong moment and I'd almost lost him.

Or when I hit him the first time. I suppose that was the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end. Our relationship had never been the halcyon idyll that Duo somehow seems to imagine; we were two very different people and spent most of our time playing roles to please Quatre's family, the press, the public. But he'd never looked at me before like he was scared of me, of what I might be capable of.

But it really ended when Quatre made it very clear, three days ago, that he no longer needed or wanted me in his life, that he was willing to invoke his name and position to keep me away from him.

I don't know. We met when we were both fifteen years old. The former mercenary who'd seen it all, done it all, and the poor little rich kid who'd had everything and knew nothing.

We got together after a mission; the two of us alone in a safehouse. I'd taken a wound to my leg; nothing serious, I'd taken a lot worse but he seemed to enjoy fussing over me. Once he'd got me tucked up in bed with hot milk and all the blankets and pillows he could find, he excused himself to take a shower and get ready for bed.

I hadn't expected to see him again that night, but he came back, standing in the doorway in his blue dressing gown, his hair slightly damp and spiked from the shower.

'Two's better than one, Trowa.' Then he turned off the light and got into bed with me, as matter-of-factly as if we'd been doing it our whole lives. I didn't realise he was trembling until I reached out for him.

I don't think I would ever have made the first move. Oh, he was cute as a button hung around a kitten's neck, and probably more innocent. I knew he liked me, but he was an affectionate, friendly sort of guy with all of us. He even tried to take care of Heero sometimes, once he'd got over being intimidated by him, and he and Duo just seemed perfect together. I didn't know back then that Duo wore his own set of masks, just like I did.

And he wasn't really my type. If you're going to shack up with someone in the middle of a war, you want to make sure they're capable of looking after their own back, and yours, and that afterwards you can both just get up and walk away, without looking back. Can't watch yourself in battle if you're worried sick about saving someone else's ass. Not that Quatre wasn't a good pilot, but he was essentially like Duo; a civillian who'd been caught up in something he didn't really understand, but lacking Duo's survival skills.

Back at the beginning, I'd figured Heero and I might hook up. Two professionals with no dangers of getting emotionally entangled; my take on Heero back then was that if he'd ever had an emotion, it had been downloaded on to his laptop and immediately deleted. But it didn't take very long to realise this wasn't quite true, and that his emotional radar was firmly fixated on Duo Maxwell, even if Duo hadn't quite noticed it yet.

Duo - well, fuck, Duo was and is plain gorgeous and hasn't a clue about it. We were friends from the word go, not like him and Quatre, but allies with similar enough backgrounds to know where we were each coming from. We didn't exactly fit the profile the scientists had wanted for their perfect Gundam Pilots and knew it.

So - it could have been either of them, but Quatre Winner had decided he wanted me and it was Quatre who climbed into my bed, in the end, and told me that the dark shadows in my heart and soul could be banished by sunlight.

Quatre was the one I'd loved from the first moment I saw him.

Fuck it, anyway. I can't believe I'm even trying this. My own fault for rifling through Duo's bookshelves and finding, in the middle of his engineering texts and thrillers and poetry, a few battered books on how to survive the break-up of a relationship. You only have to look at Duo to see that they didn't help him very much.

Duo left this morning on a flight to Miami. He claims it was something he needed to do for his job, but this time I don't blame him for running. Not after the things that Quatre said to him, exposing every wound in Duo's life that hasn't properly scabbed over. There are still things he's fragile over, and probably always will be and Quatre did an extremely efficient job of hurting him.

I think he needed to be in a place with friends who've only known him for a few years, who never saw him at his lowest. Fair enough.

Six years after Duo and Heero split up and he's still hopelessly in love, although he refuses to admit it. Duo prides himself on never lying; that doesn't mean he always tells the truth though.

We go along, mostly, with the fiction that it was a mutual, amicably agreed separation. I'm not sure how he rationalises that particular lie. He was devastated after Heero left; he'd built his whole life around being with the Perfect Soldier, but somehow he manages to be civil to him on the rare occasions they meet nowadays. I've always felt that's a form of lying, in itself, but he claims they have too many mutual friends and a permanent, obvious rift between them would force people to take sides.

Whatever, as he would say himself. He wouldn't admit it under torture but I know he relishes any tiny bit of contact, any sign that Heero still has some part in his life.

That is...not going to happen to me.

Are there degrees of betrayal? A line somewhere that defines what you will and won't put up with, regardless of love and trust and loyalty and years of shared history?

I'd always trusted Quatre, even when he almost killed me, and I'd spent months afterwards driving off his nightmares, reassuring him that none of it had been his fault.

I think Quatre finally managed to find my limit.

Did Duo ever do this stupid frigging exercise? The page is turned down and a few words underlined in red ink. It's supposed to be an exercise in 'letting go'; you trace back your relationship history and look for all the negatives, from the little niggly habits to the major problems that precipitated the break-up. Example of the former being dirty laundry left on the floor; example of the latter being infidelity.

No example of one partner drugging the other. No example of physical abuse.

There are other suggested exercises - visualise the thread that connects you to your former partner and then visualise cutting it. I've done that. Although not with the scissors they suggest. Why use a scissors when a flame thrower will do?

Or imagine your partner is in the room and tell him how you feel, tell him how much he hurt you. You're supposed to tap into your 'inner anger' for this, to hold nothing back.

But I've already done that to Quatre's face.

I spent about a third of my life with him; we met during the War and have more or less been together for the past seven years. I was his first lover; he was my first love.

During the War, when I wasn't really sure if it would ever end or we would survive, I would let him hold me in the darkness and weave stories of how our lives would be. He had it all worked out; how we would share a brightly painted caravan and travel the world with the circus, how he would compose music for us both.

We gave it a shot, the first year of peace. Who knows, it might even have worked? But Quatre was haunted by his father's death, by the fact that he'd never managed to be the son his father had wanted, and now he never would. Didn't help that his family was pressuring him to return home, that it was hard for him to fit in with the circus with the Magunacs dogging his footsteps as 'bodyguards', that he didn't really know how to adapt to life except as a terrorist on the run, or the sheltered scion of the world's most powerful family.

So we went to L2 and, if you really want to pinpoint the moment when it all turned to shit, well, it was when we stepped off that shuttle. Or when Quatre hacked open the veins in his wrists, because he could sense what his family thought about him. Not enough to deny his pacifist heritage, to leave his father to die heart-broken from his only son's betrayal, he had to have unacceptable preferences as well. He tried to kill himself when his older sister Zaida told him she was afraid to leave him alone with her two young sons, for fear of what he might do to them.

Fuck. We should have left then, left them to screw up each other's lives on that godforsaken colony but he felt he had to live up to at least one of his father's expectations, to take the Winner Corporation so we stayed. Pretending it was just another undercover mission, another infiltration. No public displays, ever, but we shared a suite at the Winner mansion, and of course Quatre Winner and his chief bodyguard needed adjoining rooms when we travelled.

Just illusions, smoke and mirrors. People see what they choose.

An illusion until his eighteenth birthday. We'd all been granted legal adult status after the War, but Quatre's father's will specified that his son would inherit when he was eighteen. Except by then, he was still trying to make WEI into something the elder woukld have been proud of.

The truth is that Quatre and I were over when he decided he no longer wanted me. So we're over. No need to pretend any more. Shouldn't that be a relief?