On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey

I\'d imagine...if he could leave that house, rejoin modern society or something like that, he could adapt very fast.

Trowa found himself thinking along these lines in the middle of another bout with insomnia.

Quatre\'s mind was spongish and clean. The only things that he seemed to retain from his former life were the basic qualities that made him uniquely himself. All the anger, bitterness, and memories that plagued Trowa\'s generation were all but absent in Quatre\'s frankness with which he addressed his surroundings and smiled so sweetly.

About movies, Trowa would need to get his hands on a laptop and a powerpack. He knew that Heero had a laptop, mainly because his father worked for a computer company, but he\'d rather not ask to borrow it. This, ofcourse, meant a dig into his college reserves. If either Cathy or, from afar, Nate protested his delve into his own account; he could already rationalize it by that he would need one eventually since more and more colleges were requiring their students to be equipped with them. His money would, indirectly, go back towards college.

As for a powerpack, he had heard Heero talking about lithium-ion batteries which were supposed to prolong computer usage up to eight hours and beyond. He really doubted that he would ever stay in that house quite so long, but it didn\'t hurt to be prepared.

And, in the way of movies, the ones that he liked tended to be a little more melancholy or violent than he wanted to expose Quatre to. At least, not yet. His list of favorites ran along the lines of: And the Band Played on (about the identification and spread of AIDs), Saving Private Ryan (many gory war scenes), The Godfather (many gory mob scenes), 28 Days Later (un-dead violence), among others.

He thought on it longer, and landed on the most benign selection that he could thif: Df: Disney movies. When he was growing up in Nate\'s house, his guardian built a collection of children\'s tapes for him. He furnished him with children\'s things, though he seldom lavished upon him parental affection. Of all the things that he gave to Trowa, love was not one of them.

Cathy loved him. Trowa wondered about this extensively. He met Cathy roughly two months before he was sent up north to live with her. Why she showed a specific interest in him and his well-being was a mystery to him. He had always been pretty sure that he was legally Nate\'s son, and was, therefore, not subject to a spontaneous exchange of custody.

It was like a watery dream the first day she appeared in his life, her arrival so blurred by confusion that Trowa couldn\'t remember it quite clearly. He\'d been in his room doing the things that he did, probably reading; it was Thursday, and there was nothing better to do on a Thursday. The door rang. He ignored it. It rang again. He ignored it. And again. Then he got up, bookmarking his novel with a finger and spiritlessly tromping downstairs to see who was bothering his house on a weekday. If it was a Jehova\'s witness, he wasn\'t sure how civilly he would be able to resolve their uninvited appeals. Probably slam the door like he always did.

When he opened the door, he tried to look as sour as possible, which wasn\'t very hard at all, and regarded the shrinking creature on his front stoop.

\"Yes?\" he said tightly through the crack in the doorway that the security chain allowed.

\"Is this Mr. Barton\'s residence?\" the young woman asked. She was dressed in a gray skirt and a crisp white blouse. Her hair was scarlet and pulled back from her face in a modestly professional fashion. She didn\'t look like a Jehova\'s witness.

\"It is,\" Trowa replied curtly. \"Do you have any business with Mr. Barton?\"

\"I think I do,\" she said with a weak smile. \"My name is Catherine Bloom...I think that he would be very interested in talking with me.\" After a pause, she added, \"As interested as I am in talking with him.\"

\"He\'s not here, right now. Check back later,\" Trowa began making ready to shut the door.

\"Wait!\" Ms. Bloom exclaimed.

Trowa stilled himself, \"What?\"

\"May I ask who you are?\" she said wringing her hands anxiously.

\"I\'m not his lover,\" Trowa said snidely.

The woman held up her hands defensively, \"I didn\'t think that! I-I just want to know your name.\"

Trowa sat on that question a moment before responding, deciding that she was fairly harmless, \"Trowa.\"

Then, he shut the door.

And, that was their first meeting.

He\'d never expected to speak to her again.

Now, he was living with her.

Nate and Cathy never filled him in on the terms of custody orthinthing else they had talked about regarding him when he wasn\'t there. All he could really say was that one day he was living with Nate, and the next, he was taking up residence with Cathy.

Maybe it was fate, he mused, thinking back to Quatre.

Quatre was his secret, his personal eye-candy, and immaterial confidante.

However, it was just these qualities that frustrated him.

First-encounter attraction required no internal prerequisite of knowledge. Personality and psychological compatibility be damned where skin was concerned (or the illusion of). On Trowa\'s first encounter with Quatre, he fell in lust with him. That much, he was certain, and it \'t \'t bother him. He admired the basic effeminacy of Quatre in the curve of his back, the poise of his posture, and the proportions of his face. Their softness was a pleasing contrast to the hard lines and masculinity of Trowa\'s body. And, probably, more than anything, Trowa liked Quatre\'s smile and the way that his eyes lit when he was excited. Trowa would spenlonglong life of finding interesting and pretty things for Quatre to sit in the warmth of his eyes.

So, those were the depths of his lust. And, as much as he would ever grow to desire Quatre, that was held in check by his keen awareness that he would never be able to sate that carnal fixation.

Love, as opposed to lust, was a far more emotional enigma. It was hinged on a mutual intellectual interest and jigsaw fit of personalities coupled with an almost equal superficial flesh interest. Trowa could, hypothetically, profess love for Quatre. Except that, he wasn\'t in love. He was falling in love, but his passion was checked, somewhat, by his resignation to never being able to consummate his love. He loved the way that Quatre seemed so very optimistic and faithful. Just now, he appeared to be untroubled by the bitterness, ugliness, and memories that plagued most people Trowa\'s age. Furthermore, his inhuman ability to focus showed that he didn\'t belong to the ADD generation. Trowa was compelled to love all the beautiful things about him; his inquisitive mind, his cheerful disposition, and his music. There would never be a time in his life that he would not be able to recall that music. Quatre could make his violin sing.

So, he may be in love with Quatre, but that was held in check almost as well as his lust, by the undeniable truth that they could never truly be together.

Back to Disney.

The Disney movies that Trowa could remember liking from his childhood were: Sleeping Beauty (almost solely for the sake of Maleficent), Robin Hood (for the foxes), The Little Mermaid (for reasons unknown. it definitely wasn\'t for Ursula. too fugly), The Lion King (lions...who doesn\'t like lions?), and The Secret of Nimh (for the rats) though that was a Don Bluth thing.

Quatre looked like a cartoon kind of person.

Trowa drifted off to sleep in the wee hours of the morning on the thought of Quatre and cartoons.

++

He never used to dream. But since his first time seeing Quatre, he had been sent on an odyssey of sleeping and waking at odd hours dreaming all the while. Dreams had to do with a sleep cycle, and Trowa suspected his recent bouts with sleeplessness to be a subconscious cattle prod to conjure life-altering visions.

The most recent of these life-related dreams had him reenacting a recast Secret of Nimh.

He was Justin, the captain of the guard of the Rats of NIMH.

Quatre was Ms. Frisby, the mouse seeking aid for her bed-ridden pup before the plow could crush her house.

Cathy took the role of Mr. Ages, the grumpy doctor that helped Ms. Frisby on many separate occasions through her plight.

Duo, Heero, and Wufei found themselves embodied by Brutus, a rat manipulated and puppeted by Jenner, but with good intentions.

A young woman with eyes similar to Quatre\'s played the part of Lady Shrew, a field creature that advised and aided Ms. Frisby.

A gruff old man played Jenner, the power-hungry rat set on sabotaging Nicodemus, in that, usurping Justin\'s right to assume leadership of the rats after his passing, and stealing Jonothan Frisby\'s last present from his wife.

What was most puzzling was who took on the role of Jeremy, the crow that helped Ms. Frisby throughout her whole ordeal.

It was Mr. Kushrenada, the proprietor of Trowa\'s school.

What in the world did he have to do with anything?

Returning to the dream, itself, Trowa\'s character didn\'t interact with Quatre until he appeared at the rosebush, the nerve of the rats of NIMH. And, just as he\'d felt that he\'d seen it as a child in the film, Trowa, as Justin, fell in love and admiration of Ms. Frisby, Quatre. He never spoke his feelings outright, but he demonstrated them, plenty.

In the pivotal point at the garden patch, he defended Quatre\'s life. He would die for Quatre.

And, in the final moments of his role, he thought: Who could love you more?

++

Trowa woke up at four-fifty in the morning.

He lay in bed a moment, thinking. Then he really got up deciding that it would be pointless to try to sleep again if he\'d just have to wake up a measly ten minutes later, anyway.

He shuffled his way to the bathroom to rouse himself further with a shower, gambling with himself all the while that Cathy would die of shock to see him up before her. It wasn\'t that he couldn\'t wake up early. This morning, alone, proved that, but, back in Austin, his school\'s band practice was in the afternoon. Orchestra was in the morning. If the occasion called for it, he\'d wake up early to practice with orchestra. He was among a handful of band members that qualified to play alongside orchestra at concerts and in competition. That meant a double-up on music. So, Trowa chose not to do it very often.

As he scrubbed himself clean under the spray of the shower, his thoughts ran back to his dream.

What the hell did Mr. Kushrenada really have to do with anything?

Then, he remembered the morning where he saw Wufei playing the cello. Quatre, or an image of Quatre, had been next to him playing the violin. How long had the Kushrenadas owned that plot of land that the school sat on? There was a possibility that itched Trowa\'s mind. Could a house have been situated in the general area of the orchestra hall? And, assuming that to be true, it was possible that Quatre had been affiliated with the owner(s) of that house. Then, with all that, there was a very real chance that there would be a journal that recorded that association. The prospect struck Trowa completely aware and invigorated him. He was lately finding himself more and more pleased by his own powers of deduction.

The main problem with testing his theory out was Mr. Kushrenada\'s cameos only at major school functions. He would have to wait for the next s mes meeting or something akin to that to bother him, whenever that would be.

++

Cathy was surprised to see him awake, but not as much as he would have liked.

While she made breakfast, Trowa packed a second bag. He tossed books, a flashlight (with a bulb), batteries, CDs, and anything else he could think of inside.

++

At school, Trowa became a quick study of avoiding his friends.

He was still a little annoyed that they had gone looking for him the day before. It had been his assumption that people would know not to bother him when he decided not to make an appearance. He didn\'t exist to amuse them.

So, partly to punish them, he ate lunch by his locker instead of heading to the cafeteria and tossed what he didn\'t eat in the trash.

It felt nice to be alone.

It gave him time to think about Quatre.

In the middle of a particularly nice daydream involving him, where Trowa still followed the Rats of Nimh theme, him as Justin and Quatre as Ms. Frisby; he was in the midst of reworking the ending to accomodate Justin and Ms. Frisby\'s romance when a voice he\'d rather not have heard interrupted his musings.

\"It must be lonely, sitting by yourself,\" Miranda \'you can call me Midi\' Une, said lavishing him with sympathy.

\"That\'s the idea,\" Trowa replied tersely as she sat on her heels.

\"\'s \'s no fun,\" she pouted.

\"I think it is,\" Trowa asserted scooting away a little as Midi leaned back on a locker next to him.

Midi smiled at him, \"I think that you\'re just avoiding people...There\'s a name for that, it...I think it starts with an \'a.\'\"

\"Antisocial,\" Trowa supplied testily.

\"Yeah, that\'s it!\" Midi exclaimed excitedly. \"That\'s why you should be around people more. It\'ll be good for you.\"

\"The only people I\'d like to associate with right now consist of: me, myself, and I,\" Trowa said as he stood up, shouldering his backpack as he did so. \"You should be getting to class,\" he informed her before stalking off.

As he pushed through the door to the foreign language wing, the bell rang.

++

The anger-portion of his brain itched.

He didn\'t like other people trying to mix themselves up in his business. He could be a reculse if he wanted. They didn\'t have a right to lecture him on social interaction. They all barely knew him.

Having no immediate person to fix his anger on, he pointed his mental guns at his French textbook. After three and a half years of taking this foreign language course, he could only tell that it was preparing him to become a professional tourist.

He had, at present, in his linguistic repitoire, the means to say: I like _, I need _, My favorite _ is _, I am from _, I am going to _, and a few other mickey mouse phrases that would do him limited good if he ever visited that country. He had no plans to, ofcourse.

He\'d rather visit Ireland. Catholic vs. Protestant action. Greens versus Orange. Aside from that, he heard that the people were generally friendly and the scenery never gave a cause for complaint.

Part of his protest against France was political, part of it was cultural, and part of it was because he had been taking lessons on the language for over three years.

They have to make everything so friggin\' hard. Verbs had to be conjugated, nouns had to be gendered, some cognates had to be false (ex. librarie is not a library. it\'s a frakkin\' bookstore), and they had to have so many other annoying idiosyncrasies.

When he\'d first taken up the language, his first thought was the desire to pass down a second language to his children so that they could have better chances at success in and out of school, not like him, who was constantly surrounded by languages that he didn\'t know when he lived in Texas. At school, a good portion of the student body spoke spanish, and if they didn\'t speak spanish, they spoke some other language. Most of the other ethnic students that weren\'t of spanish-speaking descent were Korean, and spoke Korean at school. That left about a third, or so, of the school that was white and spoke only English.

Most white students, in their search for linguistic enlightenment, flooded the Spanish classes. Those that didn\'t go to Spanish, went to German. And the people that were a little masochistic, like Trowa, entered French.

Now that he realized the true nature of his sexual tedencies, he figured that the offspring point was pretty much moot.

He was dropping French next year.

His mind wandered back to Quatre.

He wondered if he whispered: \"Mon petit chou chou\" in Quatre\'s ear, whether he\'d understand it.

TBC...


note(s):
1. \"mon petit chou chou\" means \"my little cabbage\" It\'s a French endearment. It\'s weird. My French teacher loves it.
2. all that about Texas schools (at least, in Austin) is pretty much true. There\'s a lot of Mexicans and a lot of Koreans. Then there\'s a little amount of Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and lastly (and least abundant) Japanese.
3. THANK YOU FOR ALL THE REVIEWS! YOU ARE ALL AAAAAWWWWWWEEEEESSSSOOOOMMMMEEEEE~~~~! please leave more reviews^^ thank you thank you thank you thank you