On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey
folder
Gundam Wing/AC › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
15
Views:
1,977
Reviews:
42
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Gundam Wing/AC › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
15
Views:
1,977
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.
IX
The house around him trembled hard with laughter.
Quatre held fast to the windowsill afraid that if he let go, he might tumble back and lose himself.
Teacups and powderboxes toppled over upstairs, and over two dozen carefree voices joined the chorus of disembodied glee.
He screwed his eyes shut and hunkered down as the dust began to rain down and a frenzied series of thumps sounded overhead.
In his recent existence, he couldn\'t remember ever feeling so troubled.
The boards under his feet seemed to shiver themselves into splinters and cleave apart in an urgent mania.
He cracked one eye open, stealing a look outside.
Shrouded in the shadows of the trees and cloaked in the guise of moonlight, Schroeder and his family regarded the house with a wariness that only a creature with a sixth sense for evil could.
Quatre called out to him, but he would not come. He sniffed the air with some gravity, then slipped back into the wood, followed shortly by the rest of his clan.
For the first time in his post-mortem existince, he felt the icy jaws of imminent destruction nip at his heels.
He didn\'t hear the door open or feel the mammoth pair of arms close around him, but he knew that Rashid was there.
And he felt comforted.
++
Trowa stormed into his own house jarring Cathy from her crocheting.
When she got up to see what was bothering him, he shut his door on her and locked it. Then, just to be certain, he wedged the chair from his desk under the handle.
He crashed on his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Cathy angrily shake the door handle. She hit her fists on the door.
Then, she stomped away, and then, returned; and he could hear her picking the lock. Then, she tried the handle again, and ended up twice as frustrated than before.
She raised hell calling to him through the wall and slapping her hands uselessly on it.
When she\'d had enough, she disappeared for a while.
Trowa could hear her muted voice in another room.
Was she talking to herself?
He rolled over and buried the side of his face into a pillow.
He\'d had no right to snap at Quatre like that. But, he couldn\'t take it back, now.
In one instance of unbridled rage, he\'d done what no amount of time could do. He\'d killed Quatre\'s spirit. And in that instance, it sickened him to realize that it\'d given him some perverse gratification, seeing the light fade from Quatre\'s eyes. The power to make himself and his thoughts matter to another person, to be able to hurt that person with them, had, for a brief moment, swelled his spirit.
Now that the hollow satisfaction was gone, he felt twice as small as before.
Did he have the personal integrity and fortitude to return to that house again?
But, who ever needed to return to something that they could never escape?
The house\'s dark shadow seemed to stretch far enough to reach his window and settle his room with a miserable, bleak, cold. It drew moving shapes on his wall, yellowed the edges of the textbooks open on his desk, and grinned at his back.
The demented shadows of its invisible towers and spires crept in through his window and stabbed him in his sleep.
He watched his wall in the unlit glory of his room; grew accustomed to what he saw on it, and what he imagined he saw.
Just when he had begun to drift away into a sleepless dream, a sharp knock on his door roused him.
He blinked hard and meditated a moment before answering, \"Yes?\"
Cathy\'s voice was sullen, defeated, \"It\'s Nate. He wants to talk to you.\"
The conditioning of his earlier years left him unable to do anything but comply.
He hauled himself out of bed, drew the chair away, and opened the door a crack. All the bite had been sapped out of him by time, and his placid eyes seemed to move Cathy a little when he took the phone gingerly from her defeated fingers.
Then, he shut the door again.
\"Nate,\" he said quietly.
\"Hi Trowa,\" Nate\'s tired, but, nonetheless, honeyed e coe conveyed across the line from Texas to Virginia.
\"What do you want?\" Trowa asked, taking a seat on the edge of his bed.
Nate sighed in his patient Nate-kind of way, \"I was about to ask you that very same question.\"
\"What do you mean?\" Trowa eased himself back.
\"Cathy told me that you\'ve been acting strange. It seems reasonable to me that, perhaps, you\'re trying to draw attention to yourself because you have some needs that aren\'t being met or have something fairly profound to say. If I took you for a normal teenager, I\'d think that you were angling for something material, but, since you\'re you; I\'ve learned that anything goes. I think that I know what you\'re about to say, but, humour me, and ask me, yourself.\"
\"You want me to say something?\" Trowa asked wanting to be irritated, but no longer had the energy to feel so.
\"If not now, it will eventually come up later,\" Nate reasoned.
Trowa chewed his lip thoughtfully, then he let it go, the question that had plagued him for what seemed like an eternity, \"Where did I come from?\" and the second, \"Why did you let Catherine take me away?\"
\"I didn\'t want to be the one to tell you,\" Nate began.
\"I know,\" Trowa interjected. Memories of past times when Nate had very deftly avoided answering him surfaced. He had always made it very clear to Trowa that he wasn\'t his father, but, then was extremely reluctant to fill him in on anything further.
Trowa could see Nate taking a seat at the empty dinner table and breathing in deeply once to collect his thoughts. He knew everything about Nate so well, so clearly, that he could reach out and touch the living memory in his mind as if he were also there, sitting beside Nate, watching him.
\"You were born in Russia when it was still the United Soviet Socialist Republic, 13 November 1989, two years before its official fall. To put it lightly, you were brought into this world on a sinking ship.\" Trowa heard Nate pour himself a drink. Probably cranberry juice or something akin to that, healthy enough for Nate to sip at. \"I knew your parents, Vitali and Karina Karpova through letter correspondance. The Karpova family and the Barton family have a history of friendship dating as far back as 1896, a time of heavy Easterroperopean traffic into the United States. In 1910, seven years before the revolution, the Karpova clan returned to Russia, but never broke the friendship. Back to your parents, they wrote to me when werewere born. With the civil unrest in the USSR, they wanted me to come gather you and smuggle you into the United States. I was a sophmore attending college at the time and hadn\'t the ready funds nor the time to embark on such a venture. Your parents tried to move out into rural country to escape the hot beds of dissent, but, it was everywhere. They scraped together enough money to travel by rail, east, away from Moscow. Along the way, paying fare for the connecting rails became a terrible burden. You had a sister that they left with a family around Irkutsk, then continued travelling east. Their flight by rail proved their undoing. In May 1990, a rebel terrorist organization sabotaged a train headed for Magadan. You, and three other passengers were the only survivors. When I recieved word of the crash, I pooled my resources and flew to Mongolia. I bribed my way across the border, there. Then I found the town nearest to the crash. I bought a translator and had someone direct me to where the crash survivors were being held. It was a schoolhouse turned temporary hospital. You were there. One look at you, and I knew that you were Vitali and Karina\'s son. I puchased you on the terms that you would be baptised first. I got you baptised, then I got you smuggled. I fufilled my duty to your parents as far as you were coned.ned. I didn\'t have the means to track down and collect your sister. Catherine Bloom is your sister, Trowa. She was adopted out to an American family in 1993.\"
Listening to Nate\'s story was like reading a novel synopsis. It didn\'t seem to directly involve Trowa, but rather satisfied his passive interest. He allowed the tale to write itself into his memory, and then he asked, \"Did I ever have another name?\"
\"Yes. However, I was never made aware of it,\" Nate replied.
Trowa got up from his bed and paced his room, \"For a guy that didn\'t want to tell me all that, you sound like you\'ve been spending an awful amount of time rehearsing it.\"
\"I\'ve had sixteen years to think about it,\" Nate replied.
\"Really?\" Trowa paused by his window, \"Did you ever regret it?\"
Nate set down his glass, \"No.\"
Bitter tears burned Trowa\'s eyes as he spoke through his teeth, \"You-\" He had to take a moment to breathe. \"You could have acted like it.\"
\"What do you mean?\"
\"You\'re the only family I\'ve ever known up to now, and you never, not evene, te, told me that you love me.\"
It was getting harder and harder to formulate words for Trowa, he had to take a moment to rest.
Before he could regain his bearings, Nate\'s next words hit him like a ton of bricks, \"It wouldn\'t be honest.\"
\"Honest?\" Trowa nearly shrieked.
\"Calm down,\" Nate spoke softly, stilling Trowa\'s hand before it released the book he was about to fling. \"The point at which I take up issue is this: I do not want to usurp your love for your true parents. It wouldn\'t be fair to them.\"
\"How could I love them? They\'re d...\"
Out the window, Trowa saw a luminescent body race into the wood. He could have sworn that it was Quatre. But, then, when he\'d just about convinced himself, a stag stepped gracefully out from where the phantasm had disappeared.
Trowa swallowed, clearing his throat, \"I dt knt know a Vitali or a Karina Karpova. My only parent has always been Nathaniel T. Barton. Being the people that brought me into this world, I love them as creators, and equally as distantly. You, though, only you are my parent.\"
\"Your parents were two of the finest people I\'d evad tad the pleasure to know,\" Nate said careful to sound unbothered.
Trowa sighed a little, \"I suppose that-that you won\'t say it, now. Maybe sometime later.\" He watched the stag cropping the grass in the moonlight, \"So,\" he spoke around the lump in his throat, \"how have you been?\"
+
\"Y
\"You never told me...\" Trowa said quietly handing the phone back to Cathy after some odd hours of aimless conversation.
He and Nate had never talked much; it was weird how long he managed to make the conversation last on stupid, unproductive tangents. At one point, they discussed, in length, the difference between Texas and Virginia trees.
\"Told you what?\" Cathy asked, though she knew.
\"Who you are,\" Trowa supplied for her.
Cathy dug into a corner of touchouch uncomfortably. \"You didn\'t seem interested.\"
Trowa took a seat on the opposite side. \"I am, now.\"
\"It\'s getting late,\" Cathy tried to change the subject.
\"It\'s a Friday night,\" Trowa countered.
\"Trowa,\" Cathy pursed her lips in thought, \"I don\'t think that now is the best time. I\'d wanted a little while to rehearse it or something. I\'m sure that, maybe it\'s better to receive all this information in doses, anyway.\" She laughed shallowly, \"You know, some guys go a little nutty after sudden revelations.\" She patted his shoulder in a comforting way, \"I\'m sure that Mr. Barton told you a lot, so, why don\'t you chew on that a little while, okay?\"
Trowa sat a little while longer before he got up again.
\"Sooner or later, you and Nate will come clean with me,\" Trowa looked at Cathy patiently. \"Just be sure to tell me before I become a crackpot. Good night, Catherine.\"
\"Good night, Trowa.\"
++
Duo and his reluctant accomplices called Trowa out early Saturday morning.
Trowa lay in bed, awake and irritated, for about five minutes before he decided to crawl out and greet the world.
He cranked his window open allowing the great outdoors a great view of his peeved expression and frayed flannel overshirt.
\"I\'m up,\" he said wincing at the morning taste in his mouth. He couldn\'t remember brushing his teeth the night before.
\"Morning!\" Duo chirped from just below.
Trowa rolled his eyes, \"Know what time it is?\"
\"Seven? Eight? Which one\'s right?\" Duo grinned.
Heero looked at his watch, \"Six fifty-three.\"
\"This is comparatively a better time to when he dragged us out,\" Wufei commented, more awake than Heero.
\"Five freakin\' thirty,\" Heero shuddered. \"On a Saturday.\"
\"In winter,\" Wufei elaborated helpfully.
\"In winter,\" Heero repeated distastefully.
\"Oh, keep on whining,\" Duo teased, sticking his lower lip out to better emphasize his mockery.
\"Keep that out any longer,\" Wufei started.
\"And a bird\'ll shit on it,\" Heero finished.
They earned a cheap laugh when Duo angrily sucked it back in.
\"Anyway, Tro-\" Duo began to say, then realized that the window was shut again.
\"You think he\'s pissed?\" Wufei asked wrapping his coat around his slight body more securely.
\"I\'d be,\" Heero said, \"if I wasn\'t so damn tired.\"
TBC...
note(s):
1. yay~chapter nine! This is a great achievement/ great cause of fear for me^^; I\'m already this many chapters in, and I don\'t see any imminent end to this fic. It may go beyond 20+ chapters! I have stuff planned out, but with this pacing;>> it could take a long time to get to key events. Please be patient with me^_^
2. the sabotaged train is in no way an even that can be looked up in a random factoid book or anything of that sort. I fabricated it for story purposes, and if it really happened, that\'s messed up ;>>
3. thank you: sariL2, maka, solo\'s ghost, dragonkitty, dee lenomdeplume, lilly, and elizabeth greenleaf for all your support and fantasmic reviews. I love reading reviews! ^o^ It makes me so happy and so much more inclined to write! Joy! THANK YOU! I look forward to reading more reviews if people see fit to review^_^; If you don\'t, that\'s your own business, though I most surely do appreciate reviews! I heart you all~ THANKS!
4. I\'ll update Punishing this weekend or so. SO, keep an eye out for it^_-
Quatre held fast to the windowsill afraid that if he let go, he might tumble back and lose himself.
Teacups and powderboxes toppled over upstairs, and over two dozen carefree voices joined the chorus of disembodied glee.
He screwed his eyes shut and hunkered down as the dust began to rain down and a frenzied series of thumps sounded overhead.
In his recent existence, he couldn\'t remember ever feeling so troubled.
The boards under his feet seemed to shiver themselves into splinters and cleave apart in an urgent mania.
He cracked one eye open, stealing a look outside.
Shrouded in the shadows of the trees and cloaked in the guise of moonlight, Schroeder and his family regarded the house with a wariness that only a creature with a sixth sense for evil could.
Quatre called out to him, but he would not come. He sniffed the air with some gravity, then slipped back into the wood, followed shortly by the rest of his clan.
For the first time in his post-mortem existince, he felt the icy jaws of imminent destruction nip at his heels.
He didn\'t hear the door open or feel the mammoth pair of arms close around him, but he knew that Rashid was there.
And he felt comforted.
++
Trowa stormed into his own house jarring Cathy from her crocheting.
When she got up to see what was bothering him, he shut his door on her and locked it. Then, just to be certain, he wedged the chair from his desk under the handle.
He crashed on his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Cathy angrily shake the door handle. She hit her fists on the door.
Then, she stomped away, and then, returned; and he could hear her picking the lock. Then, she tried the handle again, and ended up twice as frustrated than before.
She raised hell calling to him through the wall and slapping her hands uselessly on it.
When she\'d had enough, she disappeared for a while.
Trowa could hear her muted voice in another room.
Was she talking to herself?
He rolled over and buried the side of his face into a pillow.
He\'d had no right to snap at Quatre like that. But, he couldn\'t take it back, now.
In one instance of unbridled rage, he\'d done what no amount of time could do. He\'d killed Quatre\'s spirit. And in that instance, it sickened him to realize that it\'d given him some perverse gratification, seeing the light fade from Quatre\'s eyes. The power to make himself and his thoughts matter to another person, to be able to hurt that person with them, had, for a brief moment, swelled his spirit.
Now that the hollow satisfaction was gone, he felt twice as small as before.
Did he have the personal integrity and fortitude to return to that house again?
But, who ever needed to return to something that they could never escape?
The house\'s dark shadow seemed to stretch far enough to reach his window and settle his room with a miserable, bleak, cold. It drew moving shapes on his wall, yellowed the edges of the textbooks open on his desk, and grinned at his back.
The demented shadows of its invisible towers and spires crept in through his window and stabbed him in his sleep.
He watched his wall in the unlit glory of his room; grew accustomed to what he saw on it, and what he imagined he saw.
Just when he had begun to drift away into a sleepless dream, a sharp knock on his door roused him.
He blinked hard and meditated a moment before answering, \"Yes?\"
Cathy\'s voice was sullen, defeated, \"It\'s Nate. He wants to talk to you.\"
The conditioning of his earlier years left him unable to do anything but comply.
He hauled himself out of bed, drew the chair away, and opened the door a crack. All the bite had been sapped out of him by time, and his placid eyes seemed to move Cathy a little when he took the phone gingerly from her defeated fingers.
Then, he shut the door again.
\"Nate,\" he said quietly.
\"Hi Trowa,\" Nate\'s tired, but, nonetheless, honeyed e coe conveyed across the line from Texas to Virginia.
\"What do you want?\" Trowa asked, taking a seat on the edge of his bed.
Nate sighed in his patient Nate-kind of way, \"I was about to ask you that very same question.\"
\"What do you mean?\" Trowa eased himself back.
\"Cathy told me that you\'ve been acting strange. It seems reasonable to me that, perhaps, you\'re trying to draw attention to yourself because you have some needs that aren\'t being met or have something fairly profound to say. If I took you for a normal teenager, I\'d think that you were angling for something material, but, since you\'re you; I\'ve learned that anything goes. I think that I know what you\'re about to say, but, humour me, and ask me, yourself.\"
\"You want me to say something?\" Trowa asked wanting to be irritated, but no longer had the energy to feel so.
\"If not now, it will eventually come up later,\" Nate reasoned.
Trowa chewed his lip thoughtfully, then he let it go, the question that had plagued him for what seemed like an eternity, \"Where did I come from?\" and the second, \"Why did you let Catherine take me away?\"
\"I didn\'t want to be the one to tell you,\" Nate began.
\"I know,\" Trowa interjected. Memories of past times when Nate had very deftly avoided answering him surfaced. He had always made it very clear to Trowa that he wasn\'t his father, but, then was extremely reluctant to fill him in on anything further.
Trowa could see Nate taking a seat at the empty dinner table and breathing in deeply once to collect his thoughts. He knew everything about Nate so well, so clearly, that he could reach out and touch the living memory in his mind as if he were also there, sitting beside Nate, watching him.
\"You were born in Russia when it was still the United Soviet Socialist Republic, 13 November 1989, two years before its official fall. To put it lightly, you were brought into this world on a sinking ship.\" Trowa heard Nate pour himself a drink. Probably cranberry juice or something akin to that, healthy enough for Nate to sip at. \"I knew your parents, Vitali and Karina Karpova through letter correspondance. The Karpova family and the Barton family have a history of friendship dating as far back as 1896, a time of heavy Easterroperopean traffic into the United States. In 1910, seven years before the revolution, the Karpova clan returned to Russia, but never broke the friendship. Back to your parents, they wrote to me when werewere born. With the civil unrest in the USSR, they wanted me to come gather you and smuggle you into the United States. I was a sophmore attending college at the time and hadn\'t the ready funds nor the time to embark on such a venture. Your parents tried to move out into rural country to escape the hot beds of dissent, but, it was everywhere. They scraped together enough money to travel by rail, east, away from Moscow. Along the way, paying fare for the connecting rails became a terrible burden. You had a sister that they left with a family around Irkutsk, then continued travelling east. Their flight by rail proved their undoing. In May 1990, a rebel terrorist organization sabotaged a train headed for Magadan. You, and three other passengers were the only survivors. When I recieved word of the crash, I pooled my resources and flew to Mongolia. I bribed my way across the border, there. Then I found the town nearest to the crash. I bought a translator and had someone direct me to where the crash survivors were being held. It was a schoolhouse turned temporary hospital. You were there. One look at you, and I knew that you were Vitali and Karina\'s son. I puchased you on the terms that you would be baptised first. I got you baptised, then I got you smuggled. I fufilled my duty to your parents as far as you were coned.ned. I didn\'t have the means to track down and collect your sister. Catherine Bloom is your sister, Trowa. She was adopted out to an American family in 1993.\"
Listening to Nate\'s story was like reading a novel synopsis. It didn\'t seem to directly involve Trowa, but rather satisfied his passive interest. He allowed the tale to write itself into his memory, and then he asked, \"Did I ever have another name?\"
\"Yes. However, I was never made aware of it,\" Nate replied.
Trowa got up from his bed and paced his room, \"For a guy that didn\'t want to tell me all that, you sound like you\'ve been spending an awful amount of time rehearsing it.\"
\"I\'ve had sixteen years to think about it,\" Nate replied.
\"Really?\" Trowa paused by his window, \"Did you ever regret it?\"
Nate set down his glass, \"No.\"
Bitter tears burned Trowa\'s eyes as he spoke through his teeth, \"You-\" He had to take a moment to breathe. \"You could have acted like it.\"
\"What do you mean?\"
\"You\'re the only family I\'ve ever known up to now, and you never, not evene, te, told me that you love me.\"
It was getting harder and harder to formulate words for Trowa, he had to take a moment to rest.
Before he could regain his bearings, Nate\'s next words hit him like a ton of bricks, \"It wouldn\'t be honest.\"
\"Honest?\" Trowa nearly shrieked.
\"Calm down,\" Nate spoke softly, stilling Trowa\'s hand before it released the book he was about to fling. \"The point at which I take up issue is this: I do not want to usurp your love for your true parents. It wouldn\'t be fair to them.\"
\"How could I love them? They\'re d...\"
Out the window, Trowa saw a luminescent body race into the wood. He could have sworn that it was Quatre. But, then, when he\'d just about convinced himself, a stag stepped gracefully out from where the phantasm had disappeared.
Trowa swallowed, clearing his throat, \"I dt knt know a Vitali or a Karina Karpova. My only parent has always been Nathaniel T. Barton. Being the people that brought me into this world, I love them as creators, and equally as distantly. You, though, only you are my parent.\"
\"Your parents were two of the finest people I\'d evad tad the pleasure to know,\" Nate said careful to sound unbothered.
Trowa sighed a little, \"I suppose that-that you won\'t say it, now. Maybe sometime later.\" He watched the stag cropping the grass in the moonlight, \"So,\" he spoke around the lump in his throat, \"how have you been?\"
+
\"Y
\"You never told me...\" Trowa said quietly handing the phone back to Cathy after some odd hours of aimless conversation.
He and Nate had never talked much; it was weird how long he managed to make the conversation last on stupid, unproductive tangents. At one point, they discussed, in length, the difference between Texas and Virginia trees.
\"Told you what?\" Cathy asked, though she knew.
\"Who you are,\" Trowa supplied for her.
Cathy dug into a corner of touchouch uncomfortably. \"You didn\'t seem interested.\"
Trowa took a seat on the opposite side. \"I am, now.\"
\"It\'s getting late,\" Cathy tried to change the subject.
\"It\'s a Friday night,\" Trowa countered.
\"Trowa,\" Cathy pursed her lips in thought, \"I don\'t think that now is the best time. I\'d wanted a little while to rehearse it or something. I\'m sure that, maybe it\'s better to receive all this information in doses, anyway.\" She laughed shallowly, \"You know, some guys go a little nutty after sudden revelations.\" She patted his shoulder in a comforting way, \"I\'m sure that Mr. Barton told you a lot, so, why don\'t you chew on that a little while, okay?\"
Trowa sat a little while longer before he got up again.
\"Sooner or later, you and Nate will come clean with me,\" Trowa looked at Cathy patiently. \"Just be sure to tell me before I become a crackpot. Good night, Catherine.\"
\"Good night, Trowa.\"
++
Duo and his reluctant accomplices called Trowa out early Saturday morning.
Trowa lay in bed, awake and irritated, for about five minutes before he decided to crawl out and greet the world.
He cranked his window open allowing the great outdoors a great view of his peeved expression and frayed flannel overshirt.
\"I\'m up,\" he said wincing at the morning taste in his mouth. He couldn\'t remember brushing his teeth the night before.
\"Morning!\" Duo chirped from just below.
Trowa rolled his eyes, \"Know what time it is?\"
\"Seven? Eight? Which one\'s right?\" Duo grinned.
Heero looked at his watch, \"Six fifty-three.\"
\"This is comparatively a better time to when he dragged us out,\" Wufei commented, more awake than Heero.
\"Five freakin\' thirty,\" Heero shuddered. \"On a Saturday.\"
\"In winter,\" Wufei elaborated helpfully.
\"In winter,\" Heero repeated distastefully.
\"Oh, keep on whining,\" Duo teased, sticking his lower lip out to better emphasize his mockery.
\"Keep that out any longer,\" Wufei started.
\"And a bird\'ll shit on it,\" Heero finished.
They earned a cheap laugh when Duo angrily sucked it back in.
\"Anyway, Tro-\" Duo began to say, then realized that the window was shut again.
\"You think he\'s pissed?\" Wufei asked wrapping his coat around his slight body more securely.
\"I\'d be,\" Heero said, \"if I wasn\'t so damn tired.\"
TBC...
note(s):
1. yay~chapter nine! This is a great achievement/ great cause of fear for me^^; I\'m already this many chapters in, and I don\'t see any imminent end to this fic. It may go beyond 20+ chapters! I have stuff planned out, but with this pacing;>> it could take a long time to get to key events. Please be patient with me^_^
2. the sabotaged train is in no way an even that can be looked up in a random factoid book or anything of that sort. I fabricated it for story purposes, and if it really happened, that\'s messed up ;>>
3. thank you: sariL2, maka, solo\'s ghost, dragonkitty, dee lenomdeplume, lilly, and elizabeth greenleaf for all your support and fantasmic reviews. I love reading reviews! ^o^ It makes me so happy and so much more inclined to write! Joy! THANK YOU! I look forward to reading more reviews if people see fit to review^_^; If you don\'t, that\'s your own business, though I most surely do appreciate reviews! I heart you all~ THANKS!
4. I\'ll update Punishing this weekend or so. SO, keep an eye out for it^_-