Warnings and disclaimers in first section.
I knew Quatre had grown more than me, but it didn’t make me feel any better to discover that his clothes were long on me, the pants coming down over my feet and forcing me to roll them up so I didn’t trip on them. Lucky for me, the t-shirt was only a little big, so I didn’t look like a kid that had been playing in his big brother’s closet.
I found Trowa in his kitchen, sitting at a table that was only a little beat up. As soon as he sensed me in the doorway, his head came up and he took a deep breath. “I know I look funny, but it’s the best I can do. I didn’t realize Quatre was so much bigger than I am.”
“He wears his casual clothes looser than his business attire. He says it’s more comfortable. That isn’t what takes my breath away, Duo,” he told me, standing and moving toward me slowly. “Your hair is down. I only saw it down that one time.”
“Oh.” What was I supposed to say to that? “I had grass and stuff in it.”
“After I bandage your hands, I’ll find a brush.”
Sitting at the table with him bent over my blistered hands… I might have done more damage than I thought… I experienced a sense of déjà vu. “This is familiar, isn’t it?”
“It does seem to be a position we end up in a lot. You should take better care of yourself, or find someone to take care of you.” That should have been insulting, but since I was kinda hoping he wanted to take care of me, I nodded. “Talk to me. What did you want to say?”
This wasn’t the way I planned it, but who cares? “I grew up with a gang on L2. I won’t go into the grisly details of what happened to everyone, but it was ugly. When there wasn’t anywhere else left to go, I took what was left of us and went to a church orphanage, where we stayed for a while. That didn’t end up good, either. Everyone there was killed, other than me.”
“Duo, you don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yeah, I do. I want you to know about my past.” When he nodded and returned to putting some kind of ointment on my blisters, I took a deep breath, “I ran on my own for a while and then snuck off L2 on a ship. The ship belonged to a crazy scientist that happened to have control of a very large, black Gundam.”
“G.”
“Right; I wasn’t supposed to pilot Deathscythe, but he was mine, damn it. I wasn’t going to let him be used in the way he was originally intended. G actually gave me his blessing, suggested I take Scythe and run, so I did. You know what happened during the war and right after with Nico, so I won’t get into that, but…hell, I guess I’m trying to explain that I’ve never had a home. I’ve never really felt the need for one. I never needed more than the Hellion and the next job. That’s what I thought until you came on what was supposed to be a simple job and turned everything I thought upside down. You were there, making me think about things I had no right to think about. I knew that there was no chance for us to be together as long as you were an agent and I was a smuggler. I knew I couldn’t intrude on the life you had here; being associated with a criminal wasn’t a possibility for you.”
“You aren’t a criminal. You’re a smuggler. There is a difference.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Who’d a thought he’d be arguing that point with me? “Regardless, in the eyes of law enforcement, I’m a criminal, a thief.”
“We’ve been over this before, Duo. If you feel that way, why are you here at all?”
“We couldn’t be together if I was still a smuggler. What if I wasn’t one anymore?”
His sharp gasp proved he was listening, even if his head was down. “What are you talking about? You love your life; you told me that plenty of times.”
“I loved my life; I really did…until you left. After you were gone, I realized I didn’t give a damn about my life anymore. The only thing I considered important was thousands of miles away, working for the Preventers. After realizing that, there was only one thing to do, once I had taken care of the promise I had made Chester.”
“What promise?”
“I promised to stay on the Shoe long enough to get the PSP members off the colony, remember?”
“That’s where you’ve been this whole time? That’s what you’ve been doing?”
“Most of the time,” I hedged, recalling my trip to confront Allbright. “It didn’t take as long as I thought it would, to be honest. I worked as fast as I could and I had a lot of help. I already knew that my days as a smuggler were over before two months passed. Without you there, it wasn’t as exciting as I had thought it was before that. You changed me, Trowa.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I’d rather give up that life and have a chance to see you than continue doing what I was doing and never see you again.”
He was staring at me openly, no longer working on my hands and just holding them in his. When he didn’t say anything for several minutes, I had to look away. See, this is what happens when I opened up to someone. “I should go.”
“No. No, you shouldn’t. I never expected…I never thought I would hear you say anything like that, Duo. It was such a fight to get you to talk openly about anything,” he told me, shaking his head and taking a deep breath. “I didn’t think you would say those things to me, not even after I managed to find you.”
“I’ve wanted to tell you everything for a while…what do you mean after you managed to find me?” Pulling my hands from his grasp, I gave him a look of pure exasperation, “Please tell me you weren’t planning on doing something stupid, Trowa.”
“Did you realize you only call me Trowa when you’re really serious about something?”
I hadn’t realized that, but I knew he was trying to distract me from my question, meaning he had planned to do something stupid. “What were you going to do? Try to find me?”
“It would have been a lot easier if I had known you were still on the Shoe. I was planning to go get you and bring you back with me, by force, if necessary.”
“What if I hadn’t wanted to come?”
“Then I was going to resign and stay with you, wherever you were. I can’t be without you. Ever since I woke up and realized that you were still on the Shoe and I couldn’t get back to you, I’ve been dying a little inside every day.”
There I was, searching for the words I needed to explain how I felt and why I acted the way I did, and he had to show me up by saying something so much better. Asshole. “You do know that I wouldn’t have let you stay in space, right? You’re life and everything you care about is here. I wouldn’t have let you give that up.”
His smile was slow and sexy as he took my hands again, carefully wrapping gauze around the blisters while leaving my fingers free. “Not everything I cared about was here, Duo. I know you wouldn’t have let me give up my life here or my job. I knew you would have come back with me to keep me from giving up the life I have here. I couldn’t have let you do that if it wasn’t your choice; you would have been miserable.”
“So you were planning on dragging me back here, but you weren’t? Either I haven’t gotten enough sleep lately or that makes no damn sense at all.”
“I was going to bring you back here for a little while and then I was going to go back with you into space. I would have given up everything if you had asked me.”
“I didn’t want that. I don’t want that. It’ll be nice to go into space every once in a while, but I plan to make a home here, on Earth, where I can be close to all of you. Hell, so I can be near you.”
“While we’re talking, is there anything else you have to say to me? Anything you think you should have said before?”
I know what he’s after, but I can’t say those words while he’s watching me so closely. He must have understood that because he looked back down at my hands, studying them like they held the secrets of the ‘verse. “I…” Son of a bitch, with him right in front of me, I couldn’t say what I needed to, the words sticking in my throat. After clearing my throat, I tried again, “I…”
“Duo, it’s okay. You don’t have to say anything else.”
That’s what he said, but I could see the damn hurt in his eyes when he looked at me again. It was stupid…I’d already said that I loved him; he just couldn’t hear me at the time. It shouldn’t be any harder to say with him awake and watching me…uh-huh, yeah, right. “This shouldn’t be so damn difficult, Trowa. Why can’t I say something so simple? I’ve already said it once before.”
His laugh caught me off guard, just like the way he was watching me. He wasn’t amused, not really, but he enjoyed me being so uncomfortable. I didn’t have time to feel insulted before he leaned forward and kissed me, one of those ‘make me melt in my seat’ kind of kisses that made everything else fade away. “It isn’t easy for you because it isn’t simple. You’ve made sure to keep everyone at arm’s length to keep from getting close to them.” Trowa got a really confused look on his face all of a sudden, hands tightening on mine, “What do you mean you’ve already said it before? To Nico?”
“Ahh…no, to you. You were unconscious at the time…or mostly unconscious.” He didn’t seem too happy about that reminder, “I had to do it, Trowa. There was no way I was going to let you get hurt.”
“I know that, but why did you have to sedate me? There were other ways to ensure I would stay out of danger.”
Giving a laugh of my own, I pulled my hands from his and stood, walking around the kitchen and growling when my hair decided it was going to eat me alive…that’s what I get when I don’t braid it. “Yeah, like there was another way that would’ve worked. I could have shot you somewhere that wasn’t going to hurt really badly, but that would have been the opposite of what I wanted. I’m sooo sure you would have agreed if I had asked you to stay behind…wait, I did ask you to stay behind. Your answer was no.” Waving my arms around and stopping when I realized how damn sore they were, I kept talking, sounding more than a little hysterical, “Chester would have protected me, but not you. Sedating you was the only way to keep you safe. I love you too damn much to just let you be in that much danger. We had no real idea what we were going up against and it was too damn uncertain. You’d already been hurt and…why in the hell are you grinning at me like that?” I demanded when I turned around and found him grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“You love me.”
“Well, no shit. Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to explain?”
He was laughing like hell as he stood, wrapping long arms around me and pulling me close, “You actually said it, Duo. You said you love me, not that I didn’t already know. If you didn’t love me, you wouldn’t have come here.”
Thinking back to what I had said, I realized he was right. “That wasn’t so hard, as long as I didn’t think about it.” Sighing, I let my head rest on his chest, “I had to sedate you. You wouldn’t have listened to me if I had asked you to stay behind.”
“You’re right; I wouldn’t have. I would have been beside you, sharing the danger, as it should have been. Do you have any idea how terrified I was when I realized what you had done, what you planned to do? There was no way to know if you were walking into a trap or what kind of danger there was going to be. If Chester was going to protect you, he did a shitty job of it.”
“In his defense, I kind of sent him and Justin off in another direction. They needed to find some of Chester’s guys that had gone missing.”
“Guys that had gone missing? Who in the hell is Justin?”
Oops. Too much information can be dangerous, but so can too little information. From the way Trowa’s arms had tightened around me, I guessed that he just had enough information to flay me alive. Then again, telling him the truth wasn’t going to be much better, but at least then he wouldn’t hound me about it for hours until I told him everything. “Let’s sit down. Do you have anything to drink? This is gonna take a while.”
I didn’t think he was going to be happy about what I had done, but I hadn’t expected that level of agitation…or was it irritation, or possibly annoyance. Whatever you want to call it, he was not happy, not at all. Trowa doesn’t react to bad news like anyone else I know. When most people get mad, they rage or throw stuff or yell. When Trowa gets mad, he shuts down and glares silently for a while, then starts yelling when he realizes there’s no other way to get through to me. Yeah, he definitely got to know me during our time together.
That’s what happened as I told him of how Quatre had been rescued. I knew I was in serious trouble when his face when blank. When his eyes flared, I knew I was in deep shit. That was right about the time when I told him about being shot. When I finished telling him about everything, including the way Mark and I had rounded up the remaining PSP members, but excluding the way I had gone after Allbright, he reached forward and pulled up my shirt, air hissing through his teeth when he saw the scar.
“You were gentler than Heero when he decided to take a peek. If I hadn’t grabbed the blankets, he would have seen much more than a scar.” He had seen more, but only because he was a stubborn ass.
“Why was Heero taking a peek at anything while you were in blankets and why didn’t you have any clothes on?”
That was a question I hadn’t anticipated. “He was in my hotel room when I woke up. I don’t like sleeping in clothes, Tro.”
“I’m aware of that, but that does not explain why he was pulling blankets down.”
Trowa’s cute when he’s jealous, but I didn’t think he’d want to hear that. “I was in bed and he surprised me by yanking the blankets so he could see the scar. Apparently, Quatre had told him about it.”
“Why in the fuck was Quatre looking at you while you were half-naked?”
“I wasn’t half-naked; I showed him the scar by pulling my shirt up to make a point. I prefer the way you did it, if you want to know.” I finally understood why he had been so amused about me being jealous before. It was sweet, in a really screwed up way. “I’d rather have you touching me than anyone else.”
“You damn well better; I plan to touch you a lot in a little while,” he growled. Have I mentioned how sexy he is when he talks like that? “You could have died, love.”
“It was a risk I was willing to take.” Hearing him call me that made any inclinations to argue dissipate. He had really been worried and I couldn’t blame him for that; I would have been the same if it had been him left behind. “I knew I’d be fine.” Although there was a little while where the outcome was doubtful, I had been determined to live so I could kill Allbright. As much as I hate to admit it, that asshole had been my motivation to keep living.
His fingers were stroking the skin around the scar, finding the area where there was more feeling and making me shiver. Seeing the involuntary reaction, he lifted his head and met my eyes, revealing everything he felt in a look. As if I couldn’t see, he also verbalized what he was feeling, much more eloquently than I had. “You will never go into danger like that without me again, Duo. I will not allow you to put yourself in harm’s way unless I am by your side, going into the same situation. I love you too damn much to let you do that again, do you understand?”
“Yeah, I understand,” came out in a rush of breathed air. He was killing me with every second, each word and touch making me lose my mind. Shaking my head, I tried to clear it; it didn’t work, but I did try. “You know I’m going to go out occasionally, right? I still want to make trips into space and hope to keep helping Une when she asks. I’d like it if you could go with me sometimes, if you want.” I hoped I wasn’t assuming too much, but he acted like he wanted me around some of the time.
“I plan to go with you every time you go into space. You aren’t getting away from me again, love. I’ve already spoken to Une about the option of going with you when you have a job. She agreed that it was best for you to have someone with you.”
I bet that was an interesting conversation. I should have been angry that he had made that decision without consulting me first, but I was too damn happy to consider it. I had to say something or he would have wondered what the hell was wrong with me, “You just decided that I needed to be babysat?”
“No, I decided that I needed to be with you. If I wasn’t able to find you before Une needed you again, I was going to make arrangements to meet with you. I’m glad I won’t have to do that.”
Arguing was my best option; I didn’t want him to think that I would give in to everything he wanted in the future, but I couldn’t think of a single way to refute. My thought process wasn’t helped by the way he continued to touch me, fingers caressing the area around my wound while the other hand moved underneath my shirt, nails scraping my chest and side as it went around my back. “So what does this mean, Trowa? Do you want me to stick around for a while?”
Smiling as he leaned closer to me, Trowa tugged me to him and touched his lips to mine for a brief moment, immediately making me want more. He knew what I wanted and was having fun teasing me, one hand dropping to my leg and running up my thigh. I had somehow managed to forget how easy it was for him to distract me and how good he was at making me so hard it was painful, but he reminded me in a hurry, strong fingers tracing the bulge in my pants and making me swallow hard. “I don’t want you to stick around for a while, Duo. I want you to stay here unless we have a job for Une.”
“You’ll help me found a place to live?” Thinking when he was touching me that way, or any way for that matter, was almost impossible. His smug expression said that he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
“You already have a place to live, if you think you can stand living with me.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? You might decide you can’t stand living with me.” Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t want to live with me if I had a choice. I happen to be a bit weird, in case no one’s noticed. I have horrible nightmares that sometimes follow me into the waking world and have a tendency to be a little overbearing. I’m also at least half nuts. In my opinion, that’s a lot to deal with willingly.
“I did live with you, somewhere considerably smaller than this house. I liked being on the Hellion with you, Duo. I doubt I’d have much difficulty living with you here. Some, but not so much that I don’t want you to be here with me.”
I had been insulted and had to say something, “You’re not exactly the easiest person to be enclosed with, you know. You constantly ask questions and demand answers and enjoy making me uncomfortable and… you don’t have to be so smug, damn it.”
“I’m happy you’re here, Duo. You have no idea how happy I am that you’re here.”
I was well past the point where I still wanted to be discussing this. In my mind, everything we needed to settle was done. “I’m happy that I’m here, too. Are we done talking now?”
His eyes sharpened on mine, “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
I thought about Allbright and the part I had played in the man’s death before putting it out of my mind. I would tell Trowa about it, but I wasn’t going to do it yet, not when there was something else more important to deal with. “Nothing that can’t wait until later.” My words ended in a squeak that I’ll never admit to when he picked me up and headed for the kitchen door. “Umm, where we goin’?”
“You’ve seen the guest bedroom; now you get to see our bedroom.”
The End
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