Disclaimer - They don't belong to me. I'm not doing this for profit. Well, not monetary profit anyway; I'm getting a huge amount of fun from it.
Note: Trowa's POV
Romance and Reality:
They think I'm responsible.
Not directly, of course. I have a watertight alibi for when he vanished, as well as being half a world away, and they have only circumstantial evidence.
But there seemed to be a definite impression, in the Preventers' HQ in Madrid, that a former mercenary, former terrorist, until lately working in the security business, would know the sort of people who would carry out an abduction.
The statistics are in their favour, not mine.
If a person disappears in mysterious circumstances, more often than not the spouse or partner is involved. A proven fact, unfortunately, with a wealth of evidence to back it up.
I have, apparently, sufficient motive for wanting him to disappear.
He was making plans to marry; a fact which he'd chosen to announce on Global TV, and which could be seen as the reason why I'd abruptly left my job with WEI.
Most of his family, and no doubt most of our household staff, would be ecstatically happy to swear that we hadn't been getting on. Quatre's sisters spent years pretending they didn't know about our relationship, trying to pretend that I didn't exist; now that he's vanished, they seem happy to tell the world that I'd been his partner. His abusive partner.
It's entirely due to Heero that I was released at all, let alone with that stilted apology for any inconvenience caused. He claimed he did nothing more than contact a colleague to act on my behalf, but I know there had to have been more. I know enough about the world to realise that an elite law enforcement agency will not simply release the chief suspect in a possible murder case on the word on one Spanish lawyer, regardless of how little hard evidence they actually have.
Heero had to have pulled in some serious favours. He'd only worked for Preventers for one year, but he still does some occasional freelance work, he still has his contacts there. He had to have gone to Commander Une for this; the fact that I'm also a former Gundam Pilot wouldn't mean very much when weighed against who Quatre is.
Head of Winner Enterprises Incorporated, which effectively makes him the de facto ruler of L4. Not, naturally, that anyone would phrase it in quite those terms, but it's the truth.
My lover.
Heero hasn't explicitly said so, but I know I was released on sufferance, and purely because he vouched for me. Ostensibly, I'm a free agent; in reality, that's something of an illusion. I may be recalled for further questioning - 'helping with enquiries' was the term used - and am to be prepared for this, to be available when they deem necessary. I am forbidden to leave Earth.
Heero will probably be held responsible when I do.
I doubt he'd be able to protect me forever, though, even if I simply stay here. They haven't discovered the other motive yet, the oldest in the world.
Money.
I'd asked him not to do it, told him I had no interest whatever in the Winner fortune but he'd still insisted on making me the single major beneficiary in his will. It was something we'd talked about, once, not long after we'd moved to L4. Much of the Winner billions was tied up in trusts and company assets and long term projects but he'd insisted on leaving me a major sum, nonetheless saying I could use it to start a charity for one-legged acrobats if I chose, but his mind was made up.
In truth, I don't think either of us had thought of it in years.
Twelve months ago, I would have sworn that I would seriously never hurt him. Could never hurt him. It wasn't like I'd never come close to it; he can be damned provoking, despite that innocently angelic appearance, and there were times when he pushed me for the sheer hell of it, to see how far either of us would go.
He has his kinks, my blond angel. There have always been times when he's needed to surrender his precious control; when he's craved bright threads of pain woven through the pleasure. It helped to assuage some of the guilt; to banish for a while his own personal darkness laced with guilt and lapped with remorse.
He hides the shadows inside so very well; all the ghosts who died at his hand. He blames himself for his father's death; for never managing to please him when he was alive. The man haunts him; he's been dead for years now and Quatre is still driven to live up to all those expectations.
This is Quatre, after all. Quatre Winner could somehow find a way to assume responsibility for all the problems in the universe if he sat down and truly thought about it.
He blames himself for nearly killing me. I know that because I'm the one who holds him through the nightmares.
No one else ever sees him like that.
The first time I hit him, he was the one who held me, after, while I cried and swore I'd never do it again.
I'd meant it, then.
It wasn't just that I'd been so damned worried about him; that he'd taken off alone one morning without bothering to inform anyone, a few scant weeks after he'd almost been assassinated. It was that he'd brushed aside my concern at first, and then snapped that he was quite capable of looking after himself and didn't need a nursemaid trailing after him.
He developed a talent over the months for fabricating stories; a tumble down the stairs; a fall from his horse. He would spin these clever, elaborate excuses and laugh at his own clumsiness; so convincing I could almost believe it was the truth.
I was his bodyguard and his lover; the one who kept him safe from the rest of the world.
I couldn't even keep him safe from myself.
I'd always known that I didn't deserve someone like him. I hadn't even had a name until I stole one. I had a past that had been carved out of blood and death and shadows and no idea what he saw in me.
It had seemed the best thing was simply to forget him, to try to ignore the emptiness and to convince myself that he was better off without me, and I was better off alone.
I very definitely didn't need to drag Duo into my life.
Heero and Duo. During the war, I'd always thought, assuming any of us survived, that Quatre would go back to his family, his life. Of course he would. But I'd never imagined Heero and Duo not being together.
Duo, of course, still has it bad for Heero. It's not too obvious, if you don't know him. God knows, he's been with enough guys since they broke up; he could have anyone, the way he looks.
Until today, I hadn't realised that Heero still cared for him.
It was a mistake, the two of us ever getting together. Is it any defence to say I hadn't planned it? That nothing would have happened if he hadn't met me halfway? Fuck. Duo, of all people in the world to get involved with. A friend. But it was just intoxicating; the thought of Duo Maxwell, wanting to be with me. Duo, who knows just how it feels to lose the other half of your soul.
Ever since the day I'd met Quatre I'd known that eventually I would lose him. No way in the universe would someone like him want to stay with someone like me. But I hadn't been prepared for how much it would hurt, missing him.
At some point over the past seven years, I'd let myself be lulled into Quatre's romantic fantasy that maybe it was real, maybe it could be forever.
He was always coming up with new anniversaries for us, and ways to celebrate them.
He remembered the dates for everything; the first time we'd played music together, that night in San Fransisco; the sixty-ninth time we'd had sex; the first time I'd told him I'd loved him.
He'd started off with all the clichés garnered from his romance novels and movies; candles and rose petals scattered on the sheets; the tiny refrigerator was permanently crammed with vintage champagne and handmade chocolate truffles and Beluga caviar.
It hadn't mattered that we'd been living at the circus, sharing a battered trailer that I'd bought sixth-hand from a woman who'd kept performing poodles, and still smelt of wet dogs and cheap perfume.
I couldn't believe he was still with me, that he hadn't bolted straight back to his normal life once he'd finished his big adventure, but he'd insisted that all he'd wanted was to be with me, to share my life.
Of course, Quatre's idea of roughing it was ordering take out from Michelin-starred restaurants and having silk sheets and a velvet quilt on our sagging mattress.
He claimed to want nothing more to do with his family, with their plans for him, but it didn't change the fact that he spent hours everyday fielding importunate 'phone calls, or that one hour's interest on his bank account would have bought the whole circus and everyone in it, or that we always had a couple of Maguanacs camped outside our trailer and frequently a couple of photographers as well.
I think we had our first major row when he bought me the car. A vintage E-Type Jaguar that I'd admired in a car magazine. There were only three of that model left in the universe and he'd even had it sprayed dark green because it was my favourite colour.
He didn't even understand why I was so angry, until I'd told him. Until I'd yelled at him that I wasn't for sale; I wasn't his whore, to be paid for with ridiculous, extravagant gifts, and that none of this was real; that he was just living out his romantic fantasies but at some point he was going to come to his senses and leave me for the world that was his reality.
He'd cried, that I could have thought such a thing, that I could have doubted him so much. Even with his empathy, and my apologies, and both of our tears, it took so long to convince him that that the person I doubted was myself.
The first Valentine's Day after the War, he brought me breakfast in bed. Heart shaped pancakes he'd made himself with strawberries and whipped cream. The pancakes were inedible, naturally, but we were just discovering new and interesting ways to consume the cream when I smelt the smoke.
He'd left the heart-shaped moulds on the grill, which he'd then forgotten to turn off and for our final weeks in the trailer we never quite got rid of the smell of burning plastic.
Of course it hadn't lasted.
In the real world the heir to one to a major corporation can't just run off and join the circus, but at least he'd tried.
For all the years we'd spent on L2, reality was when the two of us were alone together. Mostly behind locked doors.
Otherwise, Quatre played the part of the dutiful son, to a dead father who'd never valued him for who he was; the loving brother to a tribe of sisters who'd never made the effort to know anything about him.
He was the first person who'd ever looked at me and seen past the darkness.
I would know if he were dead. I have to believe somehow I would know, and I will find him.