Punishing

Punishing XII

Quatre met Yuy and Maxwell for a strategy session on Saturday.

It was a baffling one hour forty minutes and twenty-seven seconds for him.

Those two that he had seen duking it out with each other only a week or so earlier were now being so-for lack of better words-complimentary!

He took a tentative prod at the glowing air between them towards the close of the meeting, \"You two may resume individual living conditions, now. I see that you are getting along quite well, so it seems fair to terminate your compulsory shared living.\" He watched them both intently.

Duo, as always, was the first to speak, \"That\'s alright! It\'s easier for us to work together now that we live together.\" A toothy grin filled up his face, \"It\'s amazing!\"

Quatre looked to Heero who shrugged.

\"Well, as long as the both of you are in mutual agreement on this,\" he looked to Heero who nodded and then suddenly became interested a random paragraph in front of him.

The meeting came to a close, and Quatre was the first to leave, followed closely by Duo who stopped him a little ways down the hall.

\"May I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Winner?\" he asked respectfully.

\"Yes, Maxwell,\" Quatre answered to the point.

Duo looked around for a semi-secluded spot and decided on the men\'s room, \"Let\'s talk in there.\"

A men\'s room...figures, Quatre thought to himself and followed his subordinate inside.

\"Now, what is it that you need to talk to me about?\" he asked after they had established themselves to be the only ones in the room.

Duo stalled for a moment, humming in his throat while he worked out what to say, then he clapped his hands together briskly to show that he was ready to speak, \"Well, there\'s no help for it. I\'ll just come out and say it. Eh, that is-if I may speak frankly...\"

Quatre sighed irritably, \"You may.\"

\"Great! It\'s been bothering me all today, but, you look like shit,\" he smiled to show no bad feelings. Before Quatre could turn a darker scowl, Duo elaborated, \"I mean, you usually look annoyed, anyway, but, today, you look exceptionally bad! Not to say that you look ugly. No way by any stretch of the imagination could you look ugly ugly, but-uh...it\'s your mood. Your mood looks bad-\" he continued talking, tripping up and recovering himself over and over again. He was having issues with smoothing over the pleats in his talk and thereby having a hard time of finding a good word to end on.

Nice save, Quatre thought from time to time and waited for Duo to trail off like he sometimes did.

After a while, he\'d had enough of hearing about how bad he looked and cut Duo off, \"Look, I don\'t have much time left. If you\'ve got another point, make it now.\"

\"Everyone, not just Yuy and me, want you to be happy sometime. Take a vacation or something,\" Duo suggested.

Quatre smiled with an ironic edge, \"Why bother? It\'s more work than work.\"

\"You could have someone handle things back at the office,\" Duo pressed.

Quatre shook his head, \"I don\'t need a vacation.\" He took a look around at the sterile lines of the bathroom punctuated to the left by stainless steel stalls and to the right by stainless steel countertops. \"I need to get out of this bathroom.\"

Duo didn\'t know whether to take it as a joke or as a cry for help. It had a ring of desparation to it, but a touch of comedic wording and pacing. He decided on a blank smile as his best bet to approach the situation, \"Alright. I\'m sorry for haulin\' you in here for nothin\'.\"

Quatre nodded, though he barely heard him.

++

After Trowa left him alone in the stall, Quatre had a moment to sit down and think.

How badly had he messed things up? What kind of damage control should he undertake? Did he want to repair the relationship that had lain stagnant for so many years and only just recently acquired fresh new buds. Was this closure?
Was this the closure that he\'d been seeking since he was seven years old, and still a girl trapped in a boy\'s body?

He could only figure it for luck that he had met Trowa again, and during his divorce proceedings nonetheless. It was as if the hand of god had pushed them together and provided Quatre with the perfect opportunity to tie up all of the loose ends from his disaffected childhood. He had been very surprised, at first, to find that his ex had retained counsel from one Mr. Barton, Trowa E., but quickly recovered and decided to test him, starting with their very first meeting and onward. Even the rendezvous on the lake was something that he\'d engaged in out of curiosity rather than pleasure.

Now, he wondered whether their meetings weren\'t pleasurable, after all.

He felt sick.

The door to the men\'s room opened, followed by Rashid\'s deep rumbling voice, \"Master Quatre, are you alright?\"

Quatre shook himself free of his reverie and hopped off of the epiphany toilet.

\"I\'m fine, Rashid.\"

++

Quatre and Duo parted ways outside the men\'s room with the young C.E.O. feeling sicker than ever.

I need air, he chanted to himself as he made a beeline for the roof.

++

Come mid-Sunday, Trowa was still mad at Quatre, though he\'d lost most of his steam by then.

Like he\'s got room to talk, it wasn\'t exactly a cake walk for me either, Trowa stewed in silence, not paying attention to the channels that he was flipping to with his available spectrum of seventy-nine, though, typically, he only alternated between roughly seven give or take.

He wanted to tell Quatre about the massive reprogramming effort that his parents undertook to turn him straight.

His father enforced monitored morning and evening prayers which always ended rather humorously in: \'please give me the strength to be kind and please give me the strength to overcome my sexual deviancy. Amen.\'

A weekly search of his room was conducted to make sure that he didn\'t own any \'compromising\' things and he was often if not always made expressly aware of his parents rifing through his stuff.

Then there were the shrink visits to the guy with a reputation for turning gays around onto the straight path. That was a bunch of bullshit. He drilled into Trowa the ability to identify kinds of relationships that typified social normality, social acceptance. Then, he cajoled and coerced Trowa into denouncing homosexuality until he was satisfied that they both believed it.

Last, but not least, there were the dating years. Trowa knew that he was expected to date, and that he was expected to perform. His parents chose the lucky ladies, he chose to be boring, and his poor dates submitted report cards to his parents that often went something like: \'a nice boy, but terribly dull.\'

When he got to college, within his first month, he had gotten laid. It wasn\'t so much due to the power of love, rather the power of protest. It was with a senior that barely interested him beyond the flesh, Eric whom he\'d met in the canteen only days earlier. The first time was among the most uncomfortable events of his life since he, due to a deficiency in sufficient height to establish dominance and the yawning gap in seniority, had to take the bottom role.

Eventually, he grew an inch or two taller, a point or two smarter, and by his senior year was able to take up the other role.

He\'d always known that the homosexuality scare had cropped up in relation to Katydid, though he couldn\'t figure out why until only recently. When he was a child, he\'d never considered himself bent. In his eyes, Katydid had been the idealized girl with the exception of her plumbing which never crossed his pre-pubescent mind until it was forgotten all together.

He tipped his face to the ceiling as if to recieve divine message, \"God-I\'m exhausted!\"

Papa Above!
Regard a Mouse.

++

On Sunday, Quatre spent the morning reading briefs and making calls.

In the early afternoon, he ran out of work.

Come late-afternoon, he had two phones set neatly in the center of the coffee table in the sitting room and he sat snugly dug into the sofa regarding them apprehensively. He felt certain that someone from work should call him, or that he should call someone from work. He looked at the bottom right corner of the table where a laminated card with Trowa\'s contact information lay tacked down by a secure border of glue and tape.

\"Is it too late?\" he wondered aloud and frowned, disappointed at his tone.
I sound more realistic when I\'m acting, he observed critically. I\'m not cut out for real emotions.

\"It couldn\'t hurt,\" he reasoned with himself, \"besides, I\'m unlisted. I could hang up and he\'d never know that it was me.\"

He reached for the ground line when, to his great relief, his cell piped up.

He snatched it gratefully, and pressed the call button.

\"What\'s wrong, Jackie?\"

A dog you are, a dog who
Conducts himself as such.
All of my other friends, alas,
Disguise themselves too much.

++

Throughout the entirety of Sunday, Taylor wondered how he could approach Quatre after the verdict, and how to shake Trixie who now considered him a bosom buddy. They met each other for drinks almost every night after the divorce hearings began, and he was beginning to tire of the tang of booze and the dullness that daily hangovers produced.

He had a shredded pack of chasers in his coat pocket which helped to subdue the more dehabilitating effects of hangovers, but could not mask the persistent ache of a brain lacking water.

\"Mr. Winner, I always knew that there was a little bit of you that was gay!\" he exclaimed to the yawning emptiness of his second floor apartment and laughed. He toasted to the blank screen of his fifty-two inch TV and sang out, \"Cheers!\" before laughing some more and knocking back a shot of cranberry juice.

The butterfly-
What are the dreams that make him
Flutter his wings?

++

Over the weekend, Trixie didn\'t want to imagine her life without a bottomless pocketbook.

She went on a few shopping sprees, ran around club hopping, and brought various strangers home.

And while she engaged in debauched acts only imaginable to those with unquenchable sexual thirsts and questionable appetites, she pretended that she was really with Mr. Barton, and downed liquor until she couldn\'t tell the difference.

Ooh Trowa! You\'re so bad! she giggled to herself.

Liu the old dame, the old dame,
Her appetite\'s given her well-earned fame,
She\'ll eat a whole cow as easily as you say her name.

++

Wufei spent Saturday and Sunday reviewing new cases with a satisfied smile.

He wondered if Quatre was happy, too. It was one less thing to worry about, after all.

Once or twice, he thought about calling him to see how he was doing, but refrained.

He relegated himself to deskwork when he wasn\'t performing calesthenics or katas.

He liked an organized peaceful life outside of the courthouse and only indulged his darker tendencies when he was a lawyer. As a lawyer, he could be as tenacious as he dared, as flamboyantly clever as he wished, and the rabid attack dog that he nurtured in his spare time while studying case law.

I need a dog, he thought to himself.

He took a walk around his desk to stretch his legs and restore circulation around his body.

Thunder cracked outside somewhere in the distance and he stopped by the window for a moment to admire the gray outside, the heavy overcast clouds that seemed to press down upon the gently sloping land in the horizon.

Or a cat.

Or both.

\"What a nice day,\" he spoke aloud softly.

Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.

TBC...

Note(s):
1. epiphany toilet - from the TV show: Scrubs
2. Papa Above!... - Emily Dickinson. A mighty fine example of apostrophe!
3. A dog you are... - Heinrich Heine
4. The butterfly... - Kaga no Chiyo
5. Liu the old dame... - Tsao Hsueh-Chin
6. Cry Havoc!... - Shakespeare
7. Please R&R
8. If anyone has complaints about absence of lemony bits and the prescence of \'leech boy,\' they can feel free to read my response on my forum (dated March 25) And, those of you that like leech boy are invited to read as well for completely different reasons
URL to my forum: http://board5.cgiworld.net/list.cgi?id=tinykitfic&now=1
TTFN