Eye Apples

part II

Quatre remembered a place that he used to hide when he was younger, when he was tired of his sisters, or some private party his father forced him to attend. No one had ever found him, save for Rashid, and luckily for his pride, Rashid was visiting his family in Arabia and wouldn\'t be able to come ferret him out.

He ran into a small wood, and picked his way quickly through the brush and brambles until he spotted the opening to the cave he\'d explored so extensively as a child. He crawled in through the narrow opening then navigated his way by heart from there until he was at the mouth of the exit overlooking a secret beach. He could have climbed down the steep rocks to the bottom, but chose, instead, to remain just looking at it. Even sticking his hand out of the shadow of his most private hiding place felt like too much exposure.

There was always a chance that the others, should they look for him, could find the secret beach, but, he was absolutely confident that they would never find him in his cave.

All the times that Rashid had caught him, he\'d been sulking on the beach.

He watched the sunset on the water. He had always liked the way that it turned the waves burgundy as if the entire ocean had been set aflame. Or, maybe it reminded him of the time in his mother\'s womb, all the warm colors and the rythmic thrum of the waves, like heartbeats.

While watching the lazy ascent of the moon, he drifted off to sleep

++

He woke sometime later, and since he couldn\'t read his watch by moonlight alone, he had absolutely no idea how long he had been out or what time it was. He stretched as much as he could in his little hollow before settling to fall asleep again.

Then, he experienced the most agitated scare of his life when a hand snuck out oe dae darkness to take a hold of his wrist. He let out a surprised squeak and tried to wrench himself away, but was instead toted (rather easily) into the uknown attacker\'s lap

\"Calm down,\" Wufei\'s voice spoke softly into his ear.

Quatre went limp almost immediately, \"How did you find me?\"

\"I\'m just that great,\" Wufei replied dismissively.

\"I...suppose that you told him...\" Quatre said, his voice barely above a whisper.

\"I told him to be fair to you,\" Wufei clarified.

\"I see,\" Quatre nodded, fighting his more immature inclination to blame the entire debacle on Wufei. Whether Wufei had said anything at all, the reality would all be the same. He\'d just tried to help, though it did make things weird. At present, Quatre was positive that Trowa had about as much desire to see him as he\'d love to take a bath in chum and wade into pirana infested waters. That was fine, for the moment, because Quatre felt the same way about him.

\"I had hoped...that he would choose you,\" Wufei said.

\"Choose?\" Quatre tried to turn his head to see Wufei\'s face.

Wufei held him tightly facing the opposite wall, \"Never speak this,\" he warned, then continued, \"Trowa is in love with Heero.\"

Quatre bit his lip to try to keep the inevitable tears at bay, \"I suppose...he would be.\"

\"It doesn\'t mean anything,\" Wufei tried to console him.

\"No,\" Quatre rasped, \"It...It just makes sense! Heero is taller, stronger, smarter, more responsible, quieter-\"

And he continued listing off attributes, he would have never stopped if Wufei didn\'t say anything.

\"I think that you\'re better than him,\" Wufei stated as clearly and soundly as one might say that the sky is blue. \"I wasn\'t going to tell you, but, honestly, you are the best out of the whole of us. And Trowa is the biggest, damndest fool for not realizing it.\"

\"Don\'t lie to me,\" Quatre tried to squirm out of the iron clad embrace. He may have been able to compliment others until his face turned blue, but he couldn\'t stand compliments directed at himself.

\"You normally know a lie when you hear one,\" Wufei started, \"but aren\'t your senses going a bit awry right now?\"

\"Wufei...what exactly are your intentions?\" Quatre asked him, giving up his immediate thoughts of escape. \"This you, right now, it\'s unusual for you, isn\'t it? It\'s not like the Wufei that I remember.\" He ran his fingers absently along the back of one of Wufei\'s hands. \"Even your...even your entire facade seems to have completely changed since before.\"

\"It has been four years. You thought I wouldn\'t change?\" Wufei asked, side-stepping the first question.

\"Ofcourse, I anticipated change, somewhat...but,\" Quatre leaned further back into Wufei. \"I\'m in the strangest predicament. I wonder whether it was the true Wufei back then, or whether it\'s the real you, right now.\"

\"I feel real, right now,\" Wufei breathed into his hair.

Quatre tried to ignore the butterflies awakening in his stomach, bedding them down with the mantra: too early, too early, too early. He didn\'t want to think himself a loose person. He had to properly mourn his first love, a show of sincerity for both himself and Trowa; for him, to show that his feelings were real (he only had them since he was fourteen, and now, he was a little older than twenty-one), and for Trowa, to realize that Quatre\'s feelings were sincere (and not immoral).

It pained and embarrassed him to feel the fissure in his heart cleaved only earlier that day being filled so soon by Wufei, a person that he felt he barely knew.

\"Maybe we should go back home, now,\" Quatre said, glad, for the first time since the beginning of the conversation, that his back was to Wufei. He didn\'t know if he could ever live it down if Wufei saw how deep his blush had become. His soul felt doughy and pliable, and as if Wufei were shaping him before all the ingredients of his inner-self had seized upon the chance to truly combine and settle.

\"After you,\" Wufei said, loosening his hold, and allowing Quatre to duck down and crawl ahead of him.

++

Outside, Wufei got a better look at what a frustrated run through the woods had done to Quatre\'s arms and legs. Without permission, he swept Quatre up into his arms, making the abductee wriggle a bit like a landed fish and fling his arms around his neck impulsively. Wufei held him tight, pleased that he didn\'t protest, and picked his way carefully out of the woods.

The weight felt good in his arms, and he was reluctant enough at the prospect of losing it that he continued to tote Quatre across the flat, manicured lawn, and into the house, unbothered by whoever might see. If it was Trowa, so much the better.

He carried Quatre up to his room, and dutifully lay him down on the bed.

Rather than \"one at a time\" all of Quatre\'s nicks and scratches, he decided that nothing short of a bath would be sufficient, and hopped to the task. He wanted to think that his only concern was Quatre\'s well-being (which, truly was about 99.9% the reason that he\'d even bothered to go out looking for him at all. If either Heero, Trowa, or Duo went missing on the tiny island, Wufei would have just stayed home and started writing obituaries.) but, there was a part of Wufei that recognized the fact that he was (rather consciously) trying to slide Trowa over and become his replacement.

He ran the bath and thought about this.

When it nea nearly full, he stopped the faucet and went to retrieve his friend.

Quatre had already dozed off.

Wufei spent a moment looking at him, even admiring the way that the grime from outside seemed to make Quatre more beautiful than usual.

Then, with great effort, he mustered the will-power to wake him.

Quatre\'s eyes, a beguiling shade of gunmetal blue, fluttered open, still foggy with sleep, as he was lifted, once again, into Wufei\'s arms.

\"Does Trowa still hate me?\" he asked sleepily, the child-like sincerity of his airy voice cutting Wufei\'s heart like a knife.

\"He doesn\'t hate you,\" Wufei assured him, setting him down on the edge of the tub.

Quatre nodded, slowly becoming more awake.

\"I can bathe myself,\" he said to Wufei after realizing where they both were.

With shaking hands, Wufei had already begun to undress him, and told him, \"No. I want to make sure that you\'re alright. It\'s okay, since we\'re both guys.\"

\"I guess so,\" Quatre acquiesced, too tired to argue.

No one had ever seen him naked before (save for a few of his sisters), and since the person he\'d most been interested in seeing him naked didn\'t even want to see his face, he figured that the harm of Wufei getting a glimpse of his body should be no big deal.

But, for some reason, the more layers of clothing that left his body, the more self-conscious he felt. When he was down to his boxers, he didn\'t feel quite so comfortable with the idea of Wufei seeing him as he had when he\'d first started.

\"If it makes you feel any better, I could bathe with you,\" Wufei suggested in the most un-perverted tone he could manage. \"That\'d make us even.\"

\"You first,\" Quatre said, gesturing towards Wufei\'s pants.

Unlike Quatre, since Wufei\'s earliest days, nakedness in front of other men didn\'t bother him. When he was a child, he had many attendants that followed him around; they bathed him, stayed in the same room with him when he went to the bathroom, dressed and undressed him, studied his anatomy to predict his future physical and intellectual strengths, among other things. Being las last and only heir to his clan, he\'d been under an enormous amount of scrutiny from the first day of his birth.

Quatre was raised in a less personally invasive manner, but no less stressful.

Besides his past of bodily openness, Wufei had a certain amount of confidence in his body. He hadn\'t stopped training in the martial arts, and had, in fact, widened his spectrum of styles from tai chi to tae kwon do to kung fu (dragon, crane, tiger, bear, monkey, etc) to Russian improvisational martial arts. He felt somewhere either on or above the same level as Trowa as far as bodies went.

Wufei almost smiled smugly when he saw the slack expression overcome Quatre\'s features after he wamplempletely divested of all his clothes. He took Quatre\'s hands in his and stood him up. Then, he slid his fingers under the elastic waist of Quatre\'s boxers and took them down; taking that time to think of all the unsexy things he could to keep his inferior regions from responding to the visual stimuli. Some of the things that went through his head included: Relena, Kujo, Dermail, and the cross-dressing hobo that made a bid for mayor in Wufei\'s city of residence a couple years back. After seeing that person, Wufei only clung more closely to his belief that: if a man wears a dress, that man had better friggin\' shave; or at least trim the hedges.

Two small splashes later, Wufei and Quatre were in the bath together.

It was a relatively uneventful bath sprinkled lightly with a few minor splashes. It was relatively safe to say that the humor had been eked of Quf Quatre\'s very soul that evening. His habitual smile was gone, replaced by a more sobered expression of resignment that was neither particularly happy, nor particularly sad.

Wufei was toweling off his hair when he saw a, most definitely, wet Quatre make a beeline for the bed.

Taking this as some sort of strange self-masochism, Wufei caught up with him and dragged him back into the bathroom where he dutifully went about drying him off, save for one place where he wasn\ure ure that his thorough hands and towel could touch (without swift and painful retribution).

He took a mental step back to observe Quatre\'s current condition, and the likelihood of the employ of violence (which, considering, this was Quatre, was far from likely).

Quatre\'s breaths had become stifled and as delicate as a butterfly\'s wings, his brows were drawn together and his eyes squeezed shut, a dusky blush rouged his cheeks, and his entire body was taut as a drawn bow, but visibly as ready to wilt as a boiled rose.

So, deciding to take his chances, Wufei started to pad down Quatre\'s groin.

That ellicited a confused moaning-whine from Quatre that got caught somewhere in the back of his throat. His hands hooked onto Wufei\'s shoulders for purchase as he tried to hold himself up straight.

\"W-What are you d-doing?\" he moaned alarmedly.

\"I\'m not entirely sure,\" Wufei admitted.

He\'d promised himself years before that he would only admire Quatre from afar. Now, not only was he violating that pledge, he was groping him (and deriving, what was probably, a very forbidden enjoyment from it).

\"Wu...fei...\" Quatre was falling against him, a sheer drop in muscular control betraying him.

Wufei held him up.

Quatre permeated his senses and cast aside all coherent thought. Words floated to the forefront of Wufei\'s conscious mind, but they were ones like: bed, Quatre + bed, bathroom=uncomfortable.

He carried Quatre to the bed and crawled over him.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized that this could be considered \"taking advantage of-\" but it hardly mattered to him now that he felt so in control. He\'d never thought a moment like this would come, and, now that it had, decided to milk it for all it was worth. If Quatre seemed to reciprocate his feelings, if even for a night, Wufei thought that he could be happy for the remainder of his life (however long [or short] that would be).

He liked the feeling of Quatre\'s skin under his fingertips, the taste of his kiss, and the look of his eyes in surrender to the moment. With all of his heart, he wanted to wipe out every trace of Trowa from Quatre and replace it with himself.

Though he\'d said that he would have liked Quatre and Trowa to end up together, and though Trowa\'s rejection of Quatre had pained him, he couldn\'t say that he wasn\'t glad; even elated. He was afraid that he was deluded in his confidence to be able to convince Quatre that he loved him, and not Trowa.

Trowa was only a distraction.

Wufei planted his hands on either side of Quatre\'s face, a profound feeling of urgency washing over him at the melty look he found there. He covered Quatre\'s face in kisses, each touch trying to convey to Quatre what he couldn\'t yet say.

Quatre\'s expression, all throut tht this interaction went from confused to pleased to disturbed to desperate.

He pretended that Wufei loved him and latched onto him for all he was worth.

He couldn\'t quite understand why Wufei was doing this to him, but the feeling was so overpowering that he didn\'t have (a) the energy, nor (b) the desire to question it.

Wufei seemed to be everywhere at once whispering things to him that he didn\'t understand. Some of it in Mandarin. Some of it in English.

Quatre responded with utterances of his own. Some in Arabic. Some in English. He couldn\'t quite tell what he was saying, himself, but loosed his tongue, anyway.

There was one word that he was sure that neither he, nor Wufei, spoke: Trowa.

Despite this scenario never realistically crossing Wufei\'s mind, he wasn\'t unknowledgeable about the mechanics of homosexual sex. Quatre seemed to have a vague understanding of it, too, since he didn\'t ask what the hell Wufei was doing with the lip balm; though, he did have the coy charm to blush.

Wufei was extremely careful and amazingly controlled when he entered Quatre, gritting his teeth to fight the sensation of the pleasurable friction. He wasn\'t stupid enough not to realize that this was his and Quatre\'s respective first times, and that their combined lack of knowledge in the physiological aspects of sex could end with miserable results. He knew that it could hurt. Worriedly, he braced himself on his elbows and watched Quatre\'s face, fighting the urge to move.

Quatre looked uncomfortable until his eyes slowly openened. A couple errant tears slid down his cheeks, before he smiled encouragingly at Wufei, telling him without speaking it: It\'s alright. Go ahead.

Wufei\'s eyes reflected his uninhibited ador as he gently began to move.

For that one moment, he felt that Quatre truly loved him.

++

Quatre woke first, a little sore all around, but not above getting out of bed.

He eased himself up to a sitting position, feeling particularly tender around his posterior, it took some effort, but he wasn\'t going to complain.

It felt a little surreal the morning after, though the residual pain was a good reality check.

He smoothed his hands over the soft bed beneath him and sat a moment.

Wufei was still asleep to Quatre\'s left, so he spent some time looking at him.

Even his sleeping face looked a little stern, but not in a bad way. His hair fell over his eyes in a careless manner that seemed to contradict every assumption about his character that Quatre had ever made.

It bothered him that all these years he\'d had the wrong impression of the man he\'d just had intercourse with the night before; his first, no less.

Who was Wufei?

Quatre hadn\'t even the foggiest notion that Wufei might have been homosexual until the last night when he was shown first-hand how off the mark he\'d been.

Did this mean that Wufei--no. It wasn\'t possible.

Then again, maybe it was.

He\'d only been wrong so far.

++

He snuck a quick shower, got dressed, made sure that he hadn\'t woken Wufei, and then, left to scavenge for some easy breakfast.

At first, he wasn\'t all that hungry, but once he had a little bit in his stomach, his appetite increased ten fold. He cleaned out a good bit of the fruit from the crisper and two pieces of plain bread from the pantry.

He was on his third clementine mulling over what had transpired the night previous when some movement off to his right caught his attention.

It was Trowa, also an early riser.

Quatre watched him for a staggering total of five seconds before returning to his own thoughts and ruminations.
Some of the mystery that had ensconed his vision of Trowa had become scratched and dulled since yesterday. It frightened him a little how alienated he felt from him. It felt as if they no longer even existed in the same world and he couldn\'t figure out why he\'d liked him in the first place.

Trowa was out of touch.

The only thing that Trowa managed to stir in him now was pubescent embarrassment at his earlier affections.
He continued eating his clementines.

++

Normally Quatre would smile at him and greet him with a sunny: Good morning.

And, for Trowa, who usually treasured silence, he found Quatre\'s to be extremely unnerving.

\"Good morning,\" he ventured tentatively.

\"Good morning,\" Quatre replied dully with no hint of further elaboration.

Bewildered and feeling like he\'d been plunged into some screwy twilight zone dimension, Trowa sought psychological refuge in the kitchen.

Quatre had undergone an overnight transformation.

Trowa couldn\'t put his finger on it, besides the lack of luster in the morning greeting.

It was as if Quatre was the child who had finally given up dolls and frivolity, then, subsequently, grew up.

When Trowa eventually returned to the dining table, he felt it would be good to salvage the mess he\'d made of their friendship the previous day. \"About yesterday-\"

\"What about it?\" Quatre sounded bored; or, was that irritation?

\"I said some things-\" Trowa started to say.

\"Don\'t worry about it,\" Quatre cut in dismissively. He had a swamp of notes spread out in front of himself, and it looked like he was trying to concentrate.

\"Quatre...\" Trowa was having the damndest time trying to get him to talk to him.

Quatre put down his pencil, folded his arms, and focused his laser-like attention on Trowa. He stared with a mild air of expectation, and when Trowa did not produce, he pursed his lips and managed a wry smile.

\"Don\'t feel like you have to say something to me. I\'m an adult, and I can take a rejection just as well as you can. I know it must feel strange, and I know that you don\'t lme, me, and, trust me, I\'m not mentally undressing you or entertaining any vulgar fantasies involving you. Everything is fine. And, if you still feel like being my friend, so much the better,\" as he spoke, he was already stacking his things. His tone had transitioned into something mechanical that Trowa didn\'t like. It marginalized their friendship and packaged it in the form of a broken product that Quatre, as the producer of said goods, was obligated to fix or replace. Quatre looked at his watch, \"I\'m sorry to run out on you, but, I have a conference call in five minutes.\" He leaned close to Trowa and whispered in a conspiratorial tone that lacked the usual bright quality it would otherwise have, had Trowa not said anything the day before, \"Gotta find a quiet place before Duo wakes up.\" He smiled coldly and walked away, pausing momentarily at the door to greet Heero.

The tension in the room was lost on Heero, who, with his one-track mind, made a straight line for the kitchen.

\"You look like you just lost your best friend,\" he muttered as he passed Trowa, completely unaware of the irony in what he\'d just said. It was supposed to be a euphemism (or a Duo-ism, or whatever Duo idiosyncratic phrase was rubbing off on him).

Trowa sprung up from the table and left.

++

To Trowa\'s most understated distress, he ran into Duo on the stairs.

Duo smiled at him slyly, \"Good job, Trowa.\"

\"What?\" Trowa demanded, completely thrown for a loop. He didn\'t know whether Duo was being a smart ass or whether it was something else that he didn\'t know that he\'d done (which happened sometimes).

The expression on Duo\'s face suddenly became very serious and confused, \"Didn\'t you--\" he made some vague gestures with his hands, \"-with Quatre?\"

It took a moment, but Trowa caught on, \"No.\"

A look of utter shock curtainedr Dur Duo\'s face, and, in a very demure gesture, his hand flew to cover his mouth. \"It wasn\'t you!\" he exclaimed.

\"Wasn\'t me, what?\" Trowa tried to extrapolate Duo\'s meaning.

Duo, however, was withdrawn into his own world, \"Then, it must\'ve been Wufei...holy shit...\"

\"What about Wufei?\" Trowa was ready to throttle Duo (aave ave Heero the trouble of the daily chore).

\"Well...*someone* boinked Quatre last night...\" Duo explained, and he would know, his room was right next to the one belonging to the only Quatre R. Winner in the galaxy. \"Since you and him are so tight, I was positive that it was you, but, it was Wufei...\" His voice was gaining momentum with the excitement of discovery. Meanwhile Trowa felt as if, Dante and his meandering be damned (no pun intended), he were performing a freefall through all the levels of hell. Duo smiled comfortingly at Trowa, \"Looks like you\'ll have to fight for him.\" He patted Trowa on the shoulder, \"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.\"

Then he hurried the rest of the way downstairs.

For Trowa, an already rotten morning had just gotten exponentially worse, and he couldn\'t understand why or how.

TBC-

note(s):
1. jeebus;>> I wonder if anyone even likes this fic. If no one does, I\'ll just retire it -_-;; You need to let me know how I\'m doing, otherwise, I\'ll just figure that it\'s something wrong and drop it.
2. go out and buy the Los Lonely Boys album. It\'s friggin\' awesome
3. expect more chapters to West Elm and Bailey and Punishing and maybe some more chapters to my other fics (the possibilites are endless) after finals week (or possibly a little before, again...possibilities). just keep in mind that they\'re coming, come hell or high water, and whut not
TTFN