Punishing

Punishing...

It was later into the potluck when Mr.Winner finally remembered that he had children, and he called them to him.

Quatre jumped up from where he was playing with Trowa to answer his father.

Trowa hadn\'t heard anything, but followed Quatre, anyway.

Mr.Winner was already introducing his daughters by the time that Quatre pushed his way through the crowd, the lace of his skirt catching on a few odd and ends.

It took a few moments of Quatre grinning up at his father before he was recognized.

A plum colored blush began to creep up Mr.Winner\'s neck at the humiliating sight of his son dressed thus. He cleared his throat and said with a grimace, \"Sadly, my son could not attend today. He was not feeling well.\"

Being an honest child, Quatre couldn\'t help piping up, \"I\'m right here, papa.\" He jumped up and down and repeated himself so that his father would see that he was, indeed, truly there.

Bad blood began to stir.

The crowd of parents and bachelors shifted around uneasily.

This was a new beast.

The plum color surfaced in Mr.Winner\'s cheeks and, most certainly, would have reached the roots of his hair, if a tactful mother hadn\'t stepped forward. \"You, most certainly, have a charming bunch of children. Your son must have exchanged clothes with my little Darla. She just loves to dress up as a boy, and there\'s almost no refusing her.\"

At first, Mr.Winner didn\'t seem to comprehend, but slowly, the red began to recede from his face. He nodded, \"Well, then, Quatre. Be sure to change your clothes back before we leave.\"

Quatre was confused, but nodded anyway.

It is a child\'s nature to endeavor to please the parent.

Shortly after this exchange, Trowa had successfully wormed his way through the crowd, effectively missing everything.

++

\"I was convinced that I would turn into a girl all the way up through age nine,\" Quatre admitted candidly. He looked painfully at Trowa. \"I thought that I would grow up to marry that neighborhood boy.\" He cleared his throat, \"This aspect of my life has relevance in relation to my engagement and subsequent marriage to Ms.Titiana.\" His voice gained a hard, bitter edge, \" I was fourteen when she married me.\"

Judge Dreiser seemed to disapprove as much as Quatre. He was old fashioned.

Mr.Chang appeared unfazed, but Trowa could sense, even above his own astonishment, a supreme sense of satisfaction radiating from that golem of a lawyer. He seemed to echo Quatre\'s relief at finally unleashing the truth.

Quatre closed his eyes a moment before plowing on with his testimony, \"But, that comes later...My father\'s boss at work was the father of that very same neighborhood boy that I\'d been smitten with. He was a church-going man, as were many of the residents of our neighborhood. Some were quiet worshippers, and some were bible-thumpers, the vocal minority. It was a generally accepted view in those parts that homosexuality was a choice and a terrible sin.

\"Ofcourse, I was regarded as a queer child, but generally harmless. I hadn\'t practiced any truly physical homosexual behavior, not in front of others, anyway, until I was six, maybe six-and-a-half. The neighborhood boy and I both believed that I was a girl, and we both believed that we were going to marry each other, so...it was only natural that we hugged and kissed like grown-ups do. However, most of this was done away from prying eyes.

\"You know how kids are...\'boy A and girl B sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, first comes love, and then comes marriage...\' and all that nonsense. We wanted to avoid the teasing that heterosexual children had to endure if they overtly expressed affection towards each other.\" He looked as if he\'d zoned out for a moment before shaking his head and smiling a little sadly, \"Anyway, we were in his room. We were supposed to be playing, like boys do, but we were playing marriage, instead.\" His eyes slipped away, back into the past, as he continued to relate his narrative.

++

Trowa had built an arch out of two chairs and an old baby blanket.

Santa Bear was the ordained minister sitting a proud two and a half feet tall behind the arch.

Even though the set-up was silly, Trowa couldn\'t help forgetting to be serious whenever Quatre was around. At that moment, to him, it did seem like they were in a church and that the chair arch was an exquisitely carved work of art laced with roses and ivy. It seemed like Santa Bear was really a minister, old and friendly looking, smiling with a wise fondness at Trowa\'s young giddiness.

Quatre ended up wearing a sheet as a wedding gown. That was alright. Just fine. Quatre looked pretty in anything.

He appeared at the end of a make-believe aisle and fairly skipped up to the arch where Trowa was waiting for him. \"Hi Trowa,\" he whispered excitedly with his sexless voice.

\"Hey Katydid,\" Trowa replied, his voice a little deeper.

They went through all of the motions that they knew for a proper wedding (meaning, the \"I do\'s\" and the \"I now pronounce you\'s\"). And, what else should follow a perfect union other than a perfect kiss?

Their lips had only just touched when a horrified gasp coming from the doorway startled them to reality.

\"What do you think you\'re doing?\" the severe shrill tone of an angry mother bellowed.

It was then that the two boys made the fatal mistake of embracing each other in fear.

Mrs.Barton marched forward, snatched Quatre up by the arm (tearing him out of Trowa\'s gentle grasp), and dragging him screaming and crying out of the house. His anguished pleas for \'Trowa\' were answered by Trowa\'s frantic cries for \'Katie.\'

At the front entryway, Trowa was barred from coming to his princess\'s aid by his mother\'s superior height and girth as she thrust the terrified boy outside and slammed the door behind him. And her parting words were: \'Stay away from my son!\'

++

\"I stayed on her front stoop until she called my house and had one of my sisters retrieve me. Then, later, she told her husband, and, he told my father. As if that wasn\'t enough, he gave my father two options: to resign or to have me outed. My father\'s choice was unquestionably \'to resign.\' For a man like my father, there was no greater shame than unorthodoxy,\" Quatre\'s eyes rested on a spot just short of Trowa\'s hands. He\'d been very careful not to mention Trowa\'s name, a courtesy that he appreciated. For a moment, Quatre\'s eyes went glassy, \"After that call, my father decided, for the first time, to interfere in my life. To make a man out of me. He started by hitting me...on my back,\" he reached back slowly patting behind his shoulder, \"so that no one would see. He knew that abuse here is illegal.\"

He clasped his hands together in front of himself, \"My father resigned, and shortly thereafter, we moved. He worked odd jobs in different cities until he learned about oil drilling in Texas. Then, everyone moved down to Texas where my father took out a loan from the family in Arabia. He had a sixth sense about money. He purchased a dusty slice of land to drill. Lo and behold, he struck one of the largest veins in the contiguous United States. That was only his jumping off point, though.\"

Quatre spent some time, then, to explain his father\'s subsequent business ventures that gained him more money than anyone else on Earth, the most notable of which was his early investment into civillian space travel.

By the time Quatre finished speaking about his father\'s business, the court day was over, ending with his ominous declaration: \"Since I took over Winner Enterprises, it has expanded thirty percent.\"

That was a huge number.

TBC....