The morning began strange and grew steadily stranger. Of course, the first strangeness for me was to wake up alone in Zechs' big bed. For a second, I had no idea where I was, for I had never awoke in that room before without having some part of Zechs pressed against some part of me. It took a second to reorient myself and figure out exactly why I was in bed alone. When I did remember that Zechs had taken Quatre away for the weekend, I gained melancholy realization that I had at least one more night of cold sheets and too much room to stretch to look forward to. There was even a small, distasteful pang of jealousy. Not that I begrudged Quatre any of Zechs' time. I was merely feeling the loss of my own time with Zechs, and I couldn't help the bad feelings that came with that. He was, after all, the first man I would truly call my lover.

I managed to put aside my own bad mood as I dressed. I had even found a small up-side to Zechs being gone, as I got to take a much longer shower without having to split the time with him. Zechs always took forever to wash his hair, and while I could see the aesthetic merit of all that hair, I simply couldn't get my head around how much of a nuisance it had to be. As with Duo's braid, I just couldn't understand why one man would want to put so much effort into something as useless as hair.

Speaking of Duo, his absence from the breakfast table that morning only added to the strangeness of the day, as we were all aware of Heero's morning routine, which was a little anal even by my standards. Still, I somewhat enjoyed the peace and quiet. That is, of course, until the calm was shattered by a shriek from Duo that could bee heard all the way downstairs in the kitchen. Heero didn't even have time to get out of his seat before we heard the pounding of feet that signaled Duo's dash down the stairs. By the time he reached the kitchen he had gained the full attention of everyone in the room, including Trowa, who was supposed to be watching the pancakes.

I assumed, by the volume and desperation of his yell, that he was being chased by at least thirty armed men. I expected, at least, that he would be bleeding from some orifice of his body when he finally reached the safety of the kitchen. These were the only explanations I could fathom for someone to rouse from a dead sleep, especially duo's corpse-like slumber, and scream that way.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Duo appeared in the doorway, not only unharmed and alone, but with the audacity to wonder why we were staring at him so oddly. He even seemed upset, angry even, that we had noticed his behavior.

It was beyond my capacity to understand, so I let Heero follow Duo as he stormed out of the room. Heero speaks Duo-ese a little more fluently than the rest of us, though only the Gods know why or how he has managed to get inside Duo's head. I'm sure it's a frightening place, for more than one reason.

With Heero and Duo gone, quiet descended on the room once again, and I went back to sipping my tea, silently keeping Trowa company as he cooked. After a few minutes, Trowa joined me at the table, setting a large stack of pancakes in the center of the table. He nodded to me as he sipped his own glass of Chinese tea. Heero had been drinking strong, black coffee before Duo interrupted, and I doubted that Duo would have a taste for the somewhat bitter Chinese herbal tea that I enjoyed, but Trowa seemed to have a taste for it, and I offered him some whenever I brewed a pot, although he only rarely indulged.

Trowa and I seemed to have formed a quiet, tenuous friendship. It was a strange thing, I mused, as my teaching was both our strongest commonality and our largest barrier. On the one hand, Trowa and I had become closer through my patient instruction and his diligent studies. We had found commonality in the enjoyment of literature and learning. On the other hand, it was difficult for Trowa to get around the teacher-student wall that had been set up, and I often found myself falling into a lecturing tone even when we were speaking as friends. Still, I was closer to Trowa than I was to any of the others.

This is why, most likely, it was so easy for me to see through his blank mask and pick up on his worry. I could easily guess the root of that concern, as everyone was aware of how close Quatre and Trowa were. Despite being uncomfortable with the familiar gesture, I reached out and grasped Trowa's had as he cupped his mug of tea. Startled, Trowa met my eyes, and I could see the pain, worry, confusion, and fear all tangled together inside his mind, where he would let no one enter and put the fears to rest, nor let any of the fears out, where they might dissipate in the assurances of Zechs' competency. Instead, they would remain inside, festering like wounds, until someone lanced them and freed Trowa of their poison.

I opened my mouth, prepared to cut to the heart of the matter if need, when a loud crash from upstairs interrupted my thoughts. I heard the pounding of feet on the stairs and had the strangest feeling of deja vou, when suddenly Heero, and not Duo, came crashing through the kitchen and stormed like a could of thunder out the back door. In another moment, Duo came staggering into the kitchen, cursing and holding a bloody nose.

Trowa and I rose instantly, my previous intent completely forgotten, and rushed to Duo's side. Prying his fingers from his face we quickly found that he had a black eye and a bloody nose, but nothing seemed broken or severely damaged. As I led Duo to a chair and Trowa ran to fetch a towel, I couldn't help but ask, "What in the world happened?"

"Nothing," Duo replied sullenly, staring decidedly at the ceiling as he held his head back to stop the flow of blood.

"Obviously something happened," I responded, "You didn't get that from one of your video games, after all."

"I got what I damn well deserved," Duo growled, leveling a glare at me that could probably peel paint off of walls. "Now piss off, Wufei."

I bit my tongue on a scathing retort of my own, as a verbal battle was probably not the best idea right now, and stepped back, giving Trowa room to step in with a towel and an icepack.

"Thanks, Trowa," Duo mumbled, wiping the blood from his face. "I've got to get this cleaned up before Zechs sees it."

"Well, you've got a pretty fair chance of managing it," I said before I could stop myself.

"What?"

"Master will not be here this weekend," Trowa interjected for me. "He went no a retreat and will not be back until Sunday night."

"Perfect timing," Duo said, and I couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not. "So where's Quatre? I don't want him to get freaked out by all this blood."

"Quatre went with Master for the weekend," Trowa said. I tensed, preparing for an barrage of curses from Duo, but none were forthcoming. Instead, he merely closed his eyes and murmured, "Fucking hell," before standing and walking into the other room. Trowa and I glanced at each other, but neither of us seemed inclined to go after Duo right now, so we quietly sat down to eat.

The strangeness didn't stop there, as much as I'd like to say it did. Once breakfast was over, I went to spend a little time in the workout room, only to find Duo already there and pumping weights like a man possessed. From his angry eyes to the dried flakes of blood on his face, Duo spoke of a man trying to rid himself of his worries via sweat, and I doubted it would be good for my health to interrupt him. It was strangely... normal, to have Duo there in the gym with me, as Heero almost always spent a little time working out on the weekend, and while he never had as much gusto as Duo was showing, he certainly had the same level of dedication. There was a dark cloud hanging around Duo, though, and as much as it didn't bother me to have him there I still couldn't put up with the shadow of gloom following him, infecting the whole room, and throwing of my rhythm as I tried to work out. After half the time I usually spent on my morning exercises, I quietly got up and left the room. I would talk to Duo later, after his sour mood had become a bit more mild.

I left the gym wholly unsatisfied with my workout. I had barely broken a sweat, and I certainly hadn't touched my endurance level as I had hoped to. But I decided not to worry. After all, how long could Duo possibly hold that pace of exercise? Instead, I opted to wait him out by picking up a book of poetry and curling up in my favorite chair in the den.

Unfortunately, by the time I got my book and made it downstairs, I could already hear the sounds of a violent video game coming from the den. I sighed in annoyance. For Duo to have made it down here before me he would have had to leave the gym almost at the same time as me.

But... I could hear the sound of weight crashing against each other coming from the gym. So how?

I rounded the corner quickly, baffled by the two paradoxical sounds. For a moment, I wondered if Duo had somehow cloned himself, a terrifying thought, when I was startled to find Trowa, not a Duo, engrossed in a violent, bloody video game.

"Trowa?" I wondered, not sure whether to believe my eyes, ears, or intuition. "What are you doing?"

"Playing," he responded simply.

"Why?" I wondered. Trowa had never shown an interest in games before, and as far as I knew he actually disliked Duo's video games. Instead of immediately answering, though, Trowa paused, allowing his character to be brutally tossed to the ground where another, larger character proceeded to stomp on him, popping him like a bloody water balloon.

"It... keeps me from thinking," he said softly, then restarted his game, his character magically reappearing, unpopped, on the screen.

"Oh," I replied dumbly. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," he replied sharply, his character slicing the head off of the one that had previously destroyed him. "No talking. No thinking. Just playing."

"Oh," I mumbled quietly, backing out of the room. "Alright then," I said, and left.

From there, I decided it would best if I fled the entire house. To be honest, I was so thoroughly unnerved that I didn't think I could spend another minute inside without losing my mind. Nothing was going as it should. Could it be me? Was I so thrown off by a bad night's sleep that I was seeing everything through a distorted lense? But that couldn't be the case; I had more control than that and, besides, something was certainly wrong with the way everyone was acting.

I knew I had to clear my head, and since it was impossible for me to find my center in the house I opted to head outside to train. There was a conveniently placed post in the yard by the barn, which I had wrapped in rope and used as a dummy for some of my more strenuous martial arts moves. Since my workout this morning had been interrupted, I thought it might be a good way to clear my head practice my kicks and jumping moves. Unfortunately, the gods were angry at me, and I arrived at my training spot only to find Heero already hard at work, using my moves on my beam.

It was a surreal moment I had just then: Trowa was acting like Duo, Duo was acting like Heero, and Heero was acting like me. Did that make me Trowa? A realized, with shockingly sudden clarity, that I had wandered around all morning, saying hardly a word to anyone. What the hell? Was I perhaps in some parallel universe where our personalities where all switched.

"I must be dreaming," I murmured to myself as I continued to watch Heero viciously destroy my training pole. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that he actually believed he could hit the four-by-four hard enough to break it in half with only his body. His face I could only liken to cold steel, for he wore no expression but that of determination. His body was covered in beads of sweat.

And yet, I noticed as I stood there watching him, was it merely my imagination, or were his cheeks just a bit more moist than the rest of him?

Perhaps I had fallen into some strange place, but some rules seemed to transcend even a shift in reality. Even here, it seemed, a split between Heero and Duo could not come without pain.