On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey

XV
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Trowa found Wufei in the orchestra hall the next morning.

At first, he hadn\'t intended to invade the sanctuary of strings, but
upon looking through the window of the door he was able to regard his
friend holding the neck of his instrument artfully with one hand, but the
bow loosely in the other and by his side. He stared ahead of himself
entranced as one might be who has after long nights of study and toil,
forgotten how to pluck out his favorite notes.

As if separate from himself, his eyes drifted to the window of the door
and he barely seemed to see Trowa.

But then, suddenly, he became conscious of himself and grew animate. He
lay the cello down in its case, and went to answer the door, bow still
entwined carelessly in the mild grip of his right hand.

The door screeched with a tired air as it opened, and Wufei regarded
Trowa cooly for a moment before speaking to him, \"What are you doing out
here? Come inside.\" He held the door as Trowa gingerly stepped over the
threshold into Orchestra territory. \"You should be practicing for the
Latter Winter Concert,\" he admonished him in the same breath with which
he had permitted him to enter.

\"I should,\" Trowa echoed emphatically, and added in a moment of ease,
\"but, then I would not be here.\"

\"No, you wouldn\'t,\" Wufei agreed, though he need not have. He took up
the seat of first chair, once more, and watched Trowa choose his seat
with a luke-warm interest. After some silence, he spoke again, \"It\'s just
as well that you\'re here this morning. I was going to lend a book to
you later, but it would be more convenient to give it to you, now.\"
Presently, he produced a slim black volume, slim by his standards, in any
case, and handed it over to Trowa who took it with no little surprise.

He turned it over in his hands and examined the cover. He didn\'t bother
to read it aloud since it would only be redundant, and it read: the
Life to Come and other stories by E.M. Forster. A red post-it tab
peeked out of the pages, and Wufei explained that it marked the story
which he was most interested in seeing Trowa read.

It wasn\'t typical of Trowa to wonder about any author in particular,
but he felt compelled to ask, \"Who is E.M. Forster?\"

Wufei tapped the floor gently with his bow and paused a moment after as
if waiting for a reply knocking, \"Forster was a man that wanted
everything that he couldn\'t have...\" His reluctance to elaborate forced a nod
from Trowa. Wufei nodded back thoughtfully, \"That\'s all that you need
know, right now.\"

With no evidence of effort, Wufei lifted the cello again out of its
case and drew on a few notes listening closely. \"Care to play a piece with
me, since you are here?\"

\"Sure,\" Trowa said as he assembled his flute. Once or twice he went
still and strained his ears.

He could have sworn that he heard a violin being tuned

++

Lunch was uneventful, so Trowa decided to get his kicks from reading
the Forster story during French.

The protagonist of the story was a young man with a heart illness. He
desired greatly to play the violin again, but the doctor wouldn\'t allow
for it because it would excite him and unsteady his heart, so, he
relegated the violin to mere thought. He was resting outside one day when he
saw a person over the fence some distance away searching for mushrooms
and called to him that there were no mushrooms to be found. The young
man that had been searching for mushrooms jumped the fence and
approached the sickly youth long enough to be invited to the house to share a
drink and to learn the name of the youth\'s doctor. They parted ways and
met again later in the story inside the house where the handsome and
educated farmhand that had been on the search for mushrooms earlier warned
the sickly youth to find a different doctor and related to him how he\'d
met the doctor in France during a time of war. The farmhand had been
wounded terribly but had not allowed the doctor to patch him up, !
and now he appeared to the sickly youth as fresh and as perfect as any
young man that had never seen war. Their talk was interrupted by the
sound of people in the hall which suddenly struck the farmhand with fear.
He pleaded with the young sickly man to hide him. Finally he was hidden
inside of a cupboard and people came at last into the room finding the
ill youth in a fit and sending out orders to fetch the doctor and
finding no one in the cupboard. Later that same day, the bed-ridden youth
was visited once again by the handsome farmhand. They spoke a little
until the sound of the doctor\'s car could be heard in the driveway. Again,
the farmhand asked to be hidden. He was permitted to hide under the
sheets of the sickly youth\'s bed. There, he entreated the youth to come
away with him. The sickly youth agreed and they entwined their limbs
together in their happiness. The doctor came into the room too late and
found his patient dead, and he was reminded of a young man that ha!
d died in France.

Thus, the story ended.

The story made Trowa\'s hair prick, and he patted it down gently while
flipping to the preface of the book.

I would like to die entwined in happiness, he thought to himself
in bad humor and duly regretted his thought when a vivid tableau of his
corpse entwined with that of Quatre\'s strutted across the vacant air
that his brain should have occupied.

He skimmed the preface and gathered from it that Forster had been an
educated homosexual man with a particular affinity for swarthy skinned
underclassed males, \'foreigners\' by another name. All of this, however
went against, first, English law, and second, the common social orthodoxy
among the upper classes of the time.

Trowa read on, against his instinctual distaste for tragedies, and
nearly devoured the entire book before the school day had ended. After
reading a few pages into \"three courses and a dessert,\" he stopped.

++

\"Does he write any happy stories?\" Trowa asked Wufei on the bus later.
He\'d had to evict Heero from his seat earlier to do it and apologized
silently to the stoic figure perched irritably beside Duo who found the
change refreshing and took the opportunity to bother his friend.

\"You didn\'t find \'A Morality\' cheerful?\" Wufei inquired blandly.

\"I had its moments,\" Trowa replied.

\"\'The Obelisk\'?\" Wufei continued.

\"It was funny at the end...\" Trowa admitted.

\"He writes well, doesn\'t he?\" Wufei declared.

Trowa had to agree. \"But, I didn\'t think that you would be the type to
read those kinds of stories.\"

\"I don\'t turn up my nose at good work,\" Wufei said simply.

\"But, why this volume in particular?\" Trowa persisted.

\"Why not?\" Wufei countered. \"Why did you read the rest of it?\"

Trowa didn\'t feel intelligent enough to confess his true motive, and
so, stayed quiet.

\"I\'m the only one who knows,\" Wufei whispered so faintly that Trowa
almost missed it. His voice grew louder, though still hard to make out,
\"How long has it been since you last visited that house?\"

\"A few weeks,\" Trowa said before he could stop himself.

\"No wonder you look so drawn,\" Wufei observed.

Trowa opened his mouth to ask a question, but was interrupted, \"How
long since you spoke to your father?\"

\"...a few weeks,\" Trowa replied.

Wufei nodded and had nothing more to say until they got off the bus.

He took Trowa aside while Heero and Duo bickered not a step away from
where they first set foot after the bus left them.

\"It\'s ready, but that old man has either forgotten or doesn\'t care to
call you. However, don\'t bother to go retrieve it just yet, the shop
will be closed by the time you get there. Go to him instead. That\'s more
important,\" Wufei instructed him.

\"You seem to know an awful lot about my business,\" Trowa accused him,
trying to keep the nervous winds that were gusting inside his chest from
rattling his voice.

\"I know an awful lot of things,\" Wufei retorted tartly.

Try as he might, Trowa couldn\'t think of a formidable response and
instead did as he was told. He followed the group up to their parting point
of West Elm and Bailey, and then turned back towards the house.

He felt wretched, the circumstances of their last parting still fresh
on his mind, and the Wilde-esque fantasizing that continued long after.
He had been, not only cruel, but perverted as well. It had been an
important factor in his extended absence. Who looks long into the eyes of a
person unaware that they have been made a lover in dreams?

Trowa toyed with the right strap of his backpack absently as he walked,
the feel of the rough plastic fibers catching against his skin set him
at ease.

++

He stood beneath the window a moment and then hoisted himself up to the
sill that had become frosted and loathe to move during his absence. He
managed to force it open within a few tries and tossed his school stuff
inside, and then himself. \"Quatre,\" he ventured to say once he was some
distance from the window.

\"Who calls?\" came the sighing reply.

Trowa could just barely make out the shape of a young man against the
dim. He wet his lips which had, at that point, become chapped, \"It\'s
Trowa.\"

\"Hullo, Trowa,\" the voice came more robust.

\"Hullo, Quatre,\" Trowa replied.

\"Have you come about the books?\" Quatre inquired kindly. \"I can\'t make
them out, really. It\'s all a bit of nonsense to me. Rashid assured me
that they would be properly seen to...but, why on Earth you came through
the window is anyone\'s guess when the front door is so much more
accessible.\"

\"Do you not know me, Quatre?\" Trowa asked.

\"Ought I?\" Quatre seemed genuinely puzzled.

Trowa strained his eyes, \"Step into the light, please.\"

Quatre obliged, and much of himself disappeared into the dusty rays of
the sun streaming through the filmy pane of the window. The only
discernable remainders of himself that stopped there were the bright blue
gems of his eyes. They regarded Trowa with a detached inquisitiveness.

\"Have we met before?\" Quatre asked, recognition flitting across the
dark flecks of his irises. \"Trowa,\" he tasted the name once more. \"Have I
spoken?\" he appealed to the space around him for a response. \"I did not
feel my lips move, nay, nor did my tongue.\" He searched the air below
him for what must have been upraised hands. The eyes directed themselves
to the glass of the window pane in which there was no reflection. \"Good
god!\" he exclaimed quietly. \"Trowa, are we quite dead?\"

Trowa watched Quatre reason with himself and nearly fainted at Quatre\'s
question, faced with the all too real prospect of being led quietly
into the arms of death by a handsome ghost. He crawled carefully to the
window until he could see his reflection and allowed himself a breath of
relief. \"No, Quatre, we are not quite dead. Only...\" he wet his lips
which had become chapped again, \"only you.\"

For a few breaths, Quatre went quite still and repeated the
conversation to himself, though it was not exactly the conversation that they had
just shared:

\"Who calls at this hour?\"

\"I calls,\" a laugh, \"Minnet. James Minnet.\"

\"Hullo Minnet, I\'ve been expecting you.\"

\"Hullo Mister Winner, I s\'pect you\'ve been expecting me.\"

\"Have you come about the books? Rashid assured me that they would be
properly seen to.\"

\"I have, and they will.\"

\"Please do send Mister Milliardo my apologies. I must not have been
quite clear when I requested the volumes. The ones that he sent to me are
quite difficult to make out. I am not as well learned as he.\"

\"Well, they will be seen to, and I\'ll tell him about your apologies.\"

\"Another thing, if you\'ll permit me-\"

\"I do.\"

\"I\'ve attatched a letter to Mister Milliardo, please be sure to give it
straight to him. I\'ll tip you for your troubles.\"

\"Alright Mister Winner.\"

\"Thank you Mister Minnet.\"

\"Jus\' Minnet will do.\"

\"Thank you Minnet, I\'ll see to it that Danish helps you.\"

\"Thank you Mister Winner.\"

\"Thank you Minnet.\"


##author\'s note: Before you get all giggly about \'Danish,\' it\'s
pronounced -> Dah-neesh. I stole it from a classmate. Thank you Danish
for letting me use your name (though I did not seek your permission
;>_>)##

Quatre\'s form gained substance, and he studied his hands a second time.
He looked at Trowa with a renewed interest, then back at his hands,
then back at Trowa. All at once, he declared in a tone and with a
certainty that surprised himself, \"It is the year two-thousand five. I\'ve been
dead for more than two-hundred years. And you are Trowa, alive for a
little more than seventeen years.\"


TBC....

note(s):
1. the Life to Come and other stories is a volume that I came
across in a second-hand bookstore while searching for a back-up copy of
Maurice. the Life to Come is a collection of short
stories, mostly tragedies, that have homosexual themes. I\'m not a fan of
tragedies, but I couldn\'t stop myself from reading Forster\'s book and liking
it. I still must say that I prefer Maurice more, but these short
storis were well-written, too. If you ever get the chance, please read
E.M. Forster works.
2. forgive me if the chapter seemed choppy. I can never tell ;>>
3. recently, I watched a French (yes...a French...) mystery
suspense/horror thriller called La Classe de Neige, litterally: The
Class of Snow but released in the U.S. as \"Class Trip.\" I didn\'t expect
to be thrilled by the movie, but it really surpassed my expectations :D
I would reccomend it to anyone. Most of its success, I would credit to
the child that played the main character, Clement Van Den Bergh as
Nicolas. He\'s grown up now, but, MAN! he was a great actor as a kid. The
next movie of his that I hope to see is La Ville Dont le Prince est un
Enfant, literally: The City Where the Prince is a Child and
marketed in America as \"The Fire that Burns\". It\'s a movie about boys
attending a boarding school pre-WWII. The boy played by Clement Van Den
Bergh is favored by one of the religious men that oversee the school
and so, when Clement\'s character acquires a friend, the man that idolizes
him spends his air-time in scheming to get rid of the friend.
Anyway, expect some creepy La Classe de Neige influenced stuff
in later chapters.

Clement Van Den Bergh
4. PLEASE R&R!
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