On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey
folder
Gundam Wing/AC › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
15
Views:
1,972
Reviews:
42
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Gundam Wing/AC › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
15
Views:
1,972
Reviews:
42
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own Gundam Wing/AC, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
V
It was at an arcade after school that Trowa was faced with a fairly interesting revelation.
\"Duo\'s had a girlfriend before?\" he whispered to Wufei leaning next to him on an out-of-order pinball machine while Duo and Heero murdered each other at Tower of Kings VII.
\"Her name was Chelsea,\" Wufei replied around an apple flavored dumdum.
\"That\'s a nice name,\" Trowa nodded liking the sound of it.
\"She\'s the female valedictorian of our school,\" Wufei clarified for him making Trowa almost choke on his drink. \"You probably don\'t know her face, but, she has long blond hair, blue eyes, and computer-leeched skin.\"
\"Computer-leeched?\"
\"Pale.\"
\"Oh.\"
\"I\'m not saying that she\'s not pretty,\" Wufei retorted defensively.
Blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin; Trowa\'s mind ran rampant. He knew someone like that, but he wasn\'t a she. He teethed his straw nervously. He hoped that his after-school arcade activities wouldn\'t have an adverse affect on his human-ghost relationship.
It took him a moment to remember that he was talking to Wufei, \"Excuse me?\"
\"I said: they dated in freshman year,\" Wufei repeated.
Trowa nodded absently.
Imagining Duo in a serious relationship was like imagining tigers mating with mice. It just didn\'t seem plausible.
\"Were they in love?\" Trowa asked.
Wufei pursed his lips in thought, then answered distantly, \"I think she was.\"
\"Only her?\"
He nodded, \"I think Duo was was doing what he thought was right. I\'m sure that he\'d date anyone if they asked him nicely.\"
\"He doesn\'t like disappointing people,\" Trowa inferred.
\"He let her down, though, unintentionally,\" Wufei continued. \"She was grown-up and he wasn\'t.\"
\"That\'s it?\" Trowa reflected quietly.
\"That\'s all he told us,\" Wufei replied.
\"Do you suppose a relationship could fall apart because of something like that?\"
\"Like what?\"
Trowa chewed his lip in thought, \"That it could be collapse under the weight of things that you can\'t help but you admired about them in the first place.\"
\"I don\'t know,\" Wufei admitted.
Trowa leaned in close to Wufei, \"This morning, did you-\"
He was interrupted by Duo\'s victory holler as it cut through the static of the arcade.
\"Yes! Bow down before your master!\" he declared turning and pointing his plastic gun at a nonplussed Heero, grinning from ear to ear.
A restrained smile curled the edges of Wufei\'s lips, \"He\'s been dying to beat Heero at that game for months.\"
++
They didn\'t quit the arcade until it was already dark outside.
Trowa had to forego his plans to check up on the ghost\'s progress in favor of rushing home to reassure a, more than likely irritated, Catherine that he was still in one piece and that he wasn\'t avoiding her.
When he got there, a lukewarm dinner awaited him that he hurriedly inhaled, and an open living room where he staked out a place at the coffee table to do his homework near his adoptive-sister\'s slippered feet.
She wasn\'t mad at him.
++
The room was cold and unfamilliar.
The candles in the corners of the room had been snuffed out leaving only the moonlight filtering in through the window to touch upon objects and make them visible. The walls were swaying back and forth, back and forth. The sound of twisting threads grated on her nerves, but she couldn\'t tell where it was coming from. It seemed to resonate from within her.
Why did her neck hurt?
She looked down at her dangling feet, so helpless, bare, and limp.
Black streams decorated her ankles and ran the shallow grooves of her feet drying on her toes.
Her hands hung lax at her sides and she couldn\'t muster the strength to lift them.
Through her personal struggle, she could hear noises downstairs. An overturned chair and the screams of her brother, the thud as he was wrested into the planked floor.
There were fifteen, maybe twenty men destroying the house down on the first floor.
Their muddied boots leaving tracks on the knit rugs, their dirty hands smudging the furniture, and their profanity hitting the walls so that they resounded all the way to up where she stayed.
They were destroying the house.
They were destroying her brother.
She looked back down at her pointed, limp feet.
They were destroying her brother ++
++
Trowa woke with a start, sitting straight up in bed, a cold sweat running down his back.
He felt around his neck instinctively but found nothing there.
He was in his room. The bedside lamp was turned off, and the moonlight filtered in through the window casting smoky shadows on the walls.
Licking his parched lips, he looked at the alarm clock next to his bed. 1AM.
He breathed heavily a few more moments before throwing himself back into bed staring up at the ceiling and shaking his head.
\"No, no way in hell,\" he said to himself.
He blinked hard, then closed his eyes.
Five minutes, and he\'d had enough of that. He was wide awake.
\"What do you want?\" he spoke to the shadows on the ceiling. \"What do you want?\"
++
\"Oh, Tro,\" Duo\'s concerned face blipped into his peripheral vision, \"you look like shit.\"
He nodded, the puffy pink rims of his eyes accentuating his sour face.
\"When did you get to sleep?\" Wufei asked tossing his lunch roll to Heero.
\"I didn\'t sleep,\" Trowa stated shortly drumming his index finger antagonizingly over the boxed lunch Cathy had made for
him.
\"You haven\'t looked very hot ever since we went to that house,\" Duo said and was immediately affronted he she sideways glare Trowa fixed him with.
Heero and Wufei glanced at each other uneasily shifting in their seats.
Trowa\'s expression softened, and he became a little shy, \"I\'m fine, thanks.\"
He looked like a man in flight from the CIA.
The rest of lunch passed tensely.
Duo almost jumped out of his seat for a victory dance when he saw Trowa\'s head hit the desk in pre-cal.
He needed the rest.
++
Trowa woke when the final bell rang.
\"Oh god,\" he said, mortified, realizing that he\'d left a quaint little deposit of spit in the dead center of his unkempt notes.
He wiped his lips with his shirt sleeve and crumpled up the evidence of his slovenly behavior before stuffing his backpack.
++
Duo, Wufei, and Heero hadn\'t waited up for him.
There was no one loitering around his locker, no notes slipped inside. Were they still upset with him over what happened at lunch?
He shut his locker, then bumped into someone as he turned to leave.
\"Excuse me?\" he said searching for an outlet.
\"Are you Trowa Barton?\" the girl asked.
Perturbed, Trowa looked up at her face, \"Yeah?\"
She visibly brightened and cowered under his gaze. A dusky blush peppered her tanned cheeks and a nervous white smile accompanied it.
It wasn\'t the first time a girl had been melted by his looks, and it wasn\'t the first time that he was unimpressed.
She was pretty, but she also wasn\'t his type.
\"Yeah?\" he repeated a tad more snappish.
\"Oh,\" she hopped to attention, \"Your sister,\" she rummaged through her pockets and handed him a folded post-it note, \"wants you to come straight home.\"
Trowa took the note and slung his backpack over his shoulder, \"Thanks, miss...\"
\"Miranda,\" the girl piped up, \"Miranda Une, but everyone calls me Midi, I\'m an office aide.\"
\"Okay Miss. Une, th,\" ,\" he said turning his back to her.
\"You\'re welcome,\" she called after him as he pushed through the exit.
++
They weren\'t on the bus either.
Catherine wasn\'t there when he got home, but there was a \"to-do\" list tacked to the front door.
This, he digressed, must be punishment for coming home late the past week. And, though he would have liked to be late another night, filial duty called and he set to work cleaning the house.
++
He\'d just wiped off the last speck of dust when Catherine came in through the front door kicking snow off her shoes on the mat.
\"Jeebus, it\'s cold!\" she complained tweaking the thermostat on her way to the living room.
She was hanging her coat in the closet when Trowa spoke up from behind her, \"Hi Cathy.\"
An unflattering shreik erupted from her as she dropped the hanger and spun to face her brother. A hand flew to her fluttering heart when he recognized her would-be attacker. \"Don\'t sneak up on people, Creepy,\" she chided him then finished hanging up her things.
\"You\'re home early,\" she commented, ple. \". \"Hell must\'ve iced over.\"
Trowa raised a brow, \"You...you told me to come home early, today.\"
Cathy fixed him with a weird lookNo, No, I didn\'t.\"
Trowa furrowed his brows, \"You left a list.\" He handed her the list he\'d found on the door.
Cathy puzzled at it a moment, \"Did you do all these?\"
\"Yeah,\" Trowa replied.
Laughter bubbled out of Catherine and filled the house. She clapped him on the shoulder, \"Honey, this isn\'t my handwriting. I think you\'ve been had.\" She handed him back the note.
Upon closer inspection, he realized that the handwriting was too jagged and uneven to be feminine. It had to be Duo\'s.
As he was grappling with this nasty revelation, he could hear Catherine in the kitchen.
\"The house looks great!\"
TBC...
note(s):
1. tiny is tired. this many chapters in such a short amount of time has sapped her yummy artzy juices.
she\'s going to take a breather to recuperate and return to write in a day or so.
this chapter\'s short \'cause she wanted to get it out to you before her mid-level thinking facilities shut down.
2. I can see the hit counter is up really high. Yet the reviews have plateaued at four;>_> I know that people read this fic, and it makes me REALLY happy. Reviews help, though^^; Words help my self-esteem more than figures!
THANKS
3. Major thanks to Ryu Nemura (Maka) for reviewing every chapter~
You\'re awesome! x100!!
\"Duo\'s had a girlfriend before?\" he whispered to Wufei leaning next to him on an out-of-order pinball machine while Duo and Heero murdered each other at Tower of Kings VII.
\"Her name was Chelsea,\" Wufei replied around an apple flavored dumdum.
\"That\'s a nice name,\" Trowa nodded liking the sound of it.
\"She\'s the female valedictorian of our school,\" Wufei clarified for him making Trowa almost choke on his drink. \"You probably don\'t know her face, but, she has long blond hair, blue eyes, and computer-leeched skin.\"
\"Computer-leeched?\"
\"Pale.\"
\"Oh.\"
\"I\'m not saying that she\'s not pretty,\" Wufei retorted defensively.
Blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin; Trowa\'s mind ran rampant. He knew someone like that, but he wasn\'t a she. He teethed his straw nervously. He hoped that his after-school arcade activities wouldn\'t have an adverse affect on his human-ghost relationship.
It took him a moment to remember that he was talking to Wufei, \"Excuse me?\"
\"I said: they dated in freshman year,\" Wufei repeated.
Trowa nodded absently.
Imagining Duo in a serious relationship was like imagining tigers mating with mice. It just didn\'t seem plausible.
\"Were they in love?\" Trowa asked.
Wufei pursed his lips in thought, then answered distantly, \"I think she was.\"
\"Only her?\"
He nodded, \"I think Duo was was doing what he thought was right. I\'m sure that he\'d date anyone if they asked him nicely.\"
\"He doesn\'t like disappointing people,\" Trowa inferred.
\"He let her down, though, unintentionally,\" Wufei continued. \"She was grown-up and he wasn\'t.\"
\"That\'s it?\" Trowa reflected quietly.
\"That\'s all he told us,\" Wufei replied.
\"Do you suppose a relationship could fall apart because of something like that?\"
\"Like what?\"
Trowa chewed his lip in thought, \"That it could be collapse under the weight of things that you can\'t help but you admired about them in the first place.\"
\"I don\'t know,\" Wufei admitted.
Trowa leaned in close to Wufei, \"This morning, did you-\"
He was interrupted by Duo\'s victory holler as it cut through the static of the arcade.
\"Yes! Bow down before your master!\" he declared turning and pointing his plastic gun at a nonplussed Heero, grinning from ear to ear.
A restrained smile curled the edges of Wufei\'s lips, \"He\'s been dying to beat Heero at that game for months.\"
++
They didn\'t quit the arcade until it was already dark outside.
Trowa had to forego his plans to check up on the ghost\'s progress in favor of rushing home to reassure a, more than likely irritated, Catherine that he was still in one piece and that he wasn\'t avoiding her.
When he got there, a lukewarm dinner awaited him that he hurriedly inhaled, and an open living room where he staked out a place at the coffee table to do his homework near his adoptive-sister\'s slippered feet.
She wasn\'t mad at him.
++
The room was cold and unfamilliar.
The candles in the corners of the room had been snuffed out leaving only the moonlight filtering in through the window to touch upon objects and make them visible. The walls were swaying back and forth, back and forth. The sound of twisting threads grated on her nerves, but she couldn\'t tell where it was coming from. It seemed to resonate from within her.
Why did her neck hurt?
She looked down at her dangling feet, so helpless, bare, and limp.
Black streams decorated her ankles and ran the shallow grooves of her feet drying on her toes.
Her hands hung lax at her sides and she couldn\'t muster the strength to lift them.
Through her personal struggle, she could hear noises downstairs. An overturned chair and the screams of her brother, the thud as he was wrested into the planked floor.
There were fifteen, maybe twenty men destroying the house down on the first floor.
Their muddied boots leaving tracks on the knit rugs, their dirty hands smudging the furniture, and their profanity hitting the walls so that they resounded all the way to up where she stayed.
They were destroying the house.
They were destroying her brother.
She looked back down at her pointed, limp feet.
They were destroying her brother ++
++
Trowa woke with a start, sitting straight up in bed, a cold sweat running down his back.
He felt around his neck instinctively but found nothing there.
He was in his room. The bedside lamp was turned off, and the moonlight filtered in through the window casting smoky shadows on the walls.
Licking his parched lips, he looked at the alarm clock next to his bed. 1AM.
He breathed heavily a few more moments before throwing himself back into bed staring up at the ceiling and shaking his head.
\"No, no way in hell,\" he said to himself.
He blinked hard, then closed his eyes.
Five minutes, and he\'d had enough of that. He was wide awake.
\"What do you want?\" he spoke to the shadows on the ceiling. \"What do you want?\"
++
\"Oh, Tro,\" Duo\'s concerned face blipped into his peripheral vision, \"you look like shit.\"
He nodded, the puffy pink rims of his eyes accentuating his sour face.
\"When did you get to sleep?\" Wufei asked tossing his lunch roll to Heero.
\"I didn\'t sleep,\" Trowa stated shortly drumming his index finger antagonizingly over the boxed lunch Cathy had made for
him.
\"You haven\'t looked very hot ever since we went to that house,\" Duo said and was immediately affronted he she sideways glare Trowa fixed him with.
Heero and Wufei glanced at each other uneasily shifting in their seats.
Trowa\'s expression softened, and he became a little shy, \"I\'m fine, thanks.\"
He looked like a man in flight from the CIA.
The rest of lunch passed tensely.
Duo almost jumped out of his seat for a victory dance when he saw Trowa\'s head hit the desk in pre-cal.
He needed the rest.
++
Trowa woke when the final bell rang.
\"Oh god,\" he said, mortified, realizing that he\'d left a quaint little deposit of spit in the dead center of his unkempt notes.
He wiped his lips with his shirt sleeve and crumpled up the evidence of his slovenly behavior before stuffing his backpack.
++
Duo, Wufei, and Heero hadn\'t waited up for him.
There was no one loitering around his locker, no notes slipped inside. Were they still upset with him over what happened at lunch?
He shut his locker, then bumped into someone as he turned to leave.
\"Excuse me?\" he said searching for an outlet.
\"Are you Trowa Barton?\" the girl asked.
Perturbed, Trowa looked up at her face, \"Yeah?\"
She visibly brightened and cowered under his gaze. A dusky blush peppered her tanned cheeks and a nervous white smile accompanied it.
It wasn\'t the first time a girl had been melted by his looks, and it wasn\'t the first time that he was unimpressed.
She was pretty, but she also wasn\'t his type.
\"Yeah?\" he repeated a tad more snappish.
\"Oh,\" she hopped to attention, \"Your sister,\" she rummaged through her pockets and handed him a folded post-it note, \"wants you to come straight home.\"
Trowa took the note and slung his backpack over his shoulder, \"Thanks, miss...\"
\"Miranda,\" the girl piped up, \"Miranda Une, but everyone calls me Midi, I\'m an office aide.\"
\"Okay Miss. Une, th,\" ,\" he said turning his back to her.
\"You\'re welcome,\" she called after him as he pushed through the exit.
++
They weren\'t on the bus either.
Catherine wasn\'t there when he got home, but there was a \"to-do\" list tacked to the front door.
This, he digressed, must be punishment for coming home late the past week. And, though he would have liked to be late another night, filial duty called and he set to work cleaning the house.
++
He\'d just wiped off the last speck of dust when Catherine came in through the front door kicking snow off her shoes on the mat.
\"Jeebus, it\'s cold!\" she complained tweaking the thermostat on her way to the living room.
She was hanging her coat in the closet when Trowa spoke up from behind her, \"Hi Cathy.\"
An unflattering shreik erupted from her as she dropped the hanger and spun to face her brother. A hand flew to her fluttering heart when he recognized her would-be attacker. \"Don\'t sneak up on people, Creepy,\" she chided him then finished hanging up her things.
\"You\'re home early,\" she commented, ple. \". \"Hell must\'ve iced over.\"
Trowa raised a brow, \"You...you told me to come home early, today.\"
Cathy fixed him with a weird lookNo, No, I didn\'t.\"
Trowa furrowed his brows, \"You left a list.\" He handed her the list he\'d found on the door.
Cathy puzzled at it a moment, \"Did you do all these?\"
\"Yeah,\" Trowa replied.
Laughter bubbled out of Catherine and filled the house. She clapped him on the shoulder, \"Honey, this isn\'t my handwriting. I think you\'ve been had.\" She handed him back the note.
Upon closer inspection, he realized that the handwriting was too jagged and uneven to be feminine. It had to be Duo\'s.
As he was grappling with this nasty revelation, he could hear Catherine in the kitchen.
\"The house looks great!\"
TBC...
note(s):
1. tiny is tired. this many chapters in such a short amount of time has sapped her yummy artzy juices.
she\'s going to take a breather to recuperate and return to write in a day or so.
this chapter\'s short \'cause she wanted to get it out to you before her mid-level thinking facilities shut down.
2. I can see the hit counter is up really high. Yet the reviews have plateaued at four;>_> I know that people read this fic, and it makes me REALLY happy. Reviews help, though^^; Words help my self-esteem more than figures!
THANKS
3. Major thanks to Ryu Nemura (Maka) for reviewing every chapter~
You\'re awesome! x100!!