Punishing

Punishing XI

Trowa caught up with Quatre just outside the courtroom.

Quatre spoke briefly with Wufei before they parted each other\'s prescence.

\"What is it, Trowa?\" he asked dispassionately.

Trowa took Quatre by the arm and steered him to the men\'s room. A Trixie-free zone.

Quatre laughed as Trowa checked to make sure that they were alone.

\"Are you going to molest me?\" he sniggered.

With a grave expression, Trowa replied, \"I don\'t know. Do you want me to?\"

It had the opposite effect of what he had wanted. Quatre just laughed harder.

It was usually against Trowa\'s intellectual sensibilities to use his height and better build to his advantage, but he knew that nothing he said would direct Quatre where he did not want to go. He dragged him into one of the stalls and shut the door behind himself. It was more cramped than he would have liked, but, they would have to make due.

Quatre sat patiently on the toilet. He could afford to since the advent of auto-cleaners which sanitized public restrooms like no one\'s business. \"Well,\" he motioned with his hand, \"now, we\'re all alone.\"

\"I\'ve been meaning to ask you since the park,\" Trowa began, and Quatre\'s face shed its mirth, \"what the two other times were that we met. I know the first meeting, now...but you never mentioned the second.\"

Quatre focused his eyes on a spot just beyond Trowa\'s right hip and smiled, \"It wasn\'t relevant to my case.\"

He raised his hand in a premptory gesture to stop anything that was forthcoming from Trowa.

\"And before you go on about how it\'s important to you, just wait and listen.\"

++

It was his senior year of highschool, and Quatre knew that he wouldn\'t be attending college.

He was one rung down from valedictorian, and should have, rightfully, gone to any post-secondary school of his choice, but that would be an insult to his tutor, Mr. Winner C.E.O. of Winner Corps. He couldn\'t afford that.

The year was winding down. An uneventful year.

Quatre still had three college visit days to waste for the semester and he decided on a whim to fly out to Harvard.

He toured the grounds with his entourage of imposing looking bodyguards and took pleasure in imagining himself in another life attending college and making his own way. Now, though, he was dug in too deep and could never see himself leaving the company. He\'d read far too many annual reports, daily briefings, attended too many conferences as his father\'s shadow, and pitched too many ideas to the board. He was a Winner man through and through.

He took a savage pleasure in planning out his future. The first thing that he would do when circumstances allowed would be to boot out his freeloading \'wife\' on her behind and sell her away-house which was one of the many superfluous Winner estates.

On his last day visiting Harvard, he stopped by the admissions office to pick up his visitor\'s documents.

That was where he saw him.

And a little more of him died.

++

Trowa remembered the moment clearly, now.

For him, it had been a slow day working off part of his tuition at admissions, and he was getting some reading in when he heard the door and looked up from his work.

He felt the breath sail out of him, though he controlled his face to remain impassive.

He\'d never seen a finer specimen of human since the maturation of his sex-drive, and the magnetism between them seemed irresistable. He closed his book without marking the page and pressed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose before asking in a slow thoughtful way, \"Hello, is there anything that I can do for you?\"

The youth before him looked stunned for a moment, and then replied as if a revelation had struck him in that instant, \"No...no, you can\'t help me.\" He turned and stepped out the door, \"Thank you for asking, though. Have a good day.\"

The door clacked shut, and Trowa eventually forgot the incident nearly completely.

++

Quatre smiled painfully, \"I would recognize that maw of yours anywhere.\"

\"Did you ever get your papers?\" Trowa asked, \"Through someone else?\"

\"Rashid retrieved the papers for me,\" Quatre explained. \"I had a nearly perfect reputation to maintain at school.\"

Struck by capricious fancy, Trowa felt compelled to ask, \"Do you love me, Quatre?\"

Quatre shook his head and refused to answer, \"Maybe after Monday.\"

Suddenly more serious, Trowa leaned over him, \"Do you love me?\"

\"That\'s a strong word,\" Quatre replied.

\"I need an answer,\" Trowa pressed.

Quatre grew by degrees more resistant the more that Trowa kept after it. His eyes took on a sharp sheen, and the muscles in his body wound back before an eight year old venom crept into his voice, a gauzy lace to cut Trowa\'s cheek. \"What are you? My father? Are you going to bully me until I tell you what you want to hear? Until I tell you that you\'re a godsend that deigned to come down from upon high to rescue poor little me? That I need you, that I want you, that I dream about you-\" his eyes hardened, \"I\'m nobody\'s fool. Not my father\'s, and most certainly, not yours.\"

\"No, Quatre,\" Trowa protested.

\"\'No,\' what, Trowa?\" Quatre rose up from where he sat, though it was uncomfortable.

In an unconscious gesture Trowa stepped back as far as he could manage to give Quatre more room. \"Is this a willful misconception on your part or do you honestly believe that I\'m putting my own ego above your well-being?\"

Quatre laughed, though it missed its earlier lightness, \"That all depends on you, doesn\'t it?\"

That splintered Trowa\'s nerves and burned his ears. The bitter taste that the petty remark left made him want to hit something.

An ugly feeling flared up in Trowa\'s chest and an ugly phrase rose out of the snarls of his mind, I hate you.

\"Fine,\" he replied tersely.

He tripped the latch to the stall and left, and had a thought to slam the door, but let it close lazily on its own.

++

Outside, he encountered both Taylor and Trixie all at once. They harried him incessantly about what had occupied him in the men\'s room and about forecasts for the verdict of the case to which he replied in a uniformly irritated manner, \"None of your business!\"

All the way out to the steps of the courthouse, he wasn\'t having it anymore. He turned in a swirl of nearly blind fury and let loose with all of the sound that his lungs could carry, \"FUCK OFF!\"

He turned a few heads, but didn\'t care.

Taylor and Trixie stood like trolls in sunlight, and Trowa left them there like that.

All that he could think, beyond all logic, was:

I\'ll never make it as an attorney. They\'ll never let me back in there after that.

Then he laughed to himself, at what, he couldn\'t tell.

TBC....


note(s):
1. You wanted conflict, I wrote in some conflict.
You wanted Trowa to have to fight for Quatre, well, there you go.
You wanted Trowa to have to duke it out with Taylor for Quatre...eh...maybe not ;>>
I wanted to torture Trowa, and I did =P
2. This chappie is short because it seems like a good place to leave off for me, for a while. I love being evil. I know how much you guys hate cliff-hangers *evil jig* And I wanted to update as soon as possible because I got SO MANY wonderful reviews for the last chapter. I wore a \"WOW!\" face for an entire week of joyness. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
3. As always, please R&R