20-Mar-2000
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing and the G-boys are someone else's property. I'm just renting them.
I came in and saw him stretched out on the floor. Duo had made a nest of blankets and pillows and he curled there, a sweet child with tumbling loose waves of glowing chestnut following the tender curve of his shoulder and the perfect whiteness of his wrist where it lay against his cheek. He wore a red sweater and blue jeans, but somehow what I saw was the just the colour, the faded colour of his clothing and not the style or articles themselves. He was like some innocent angel lying there, his long thick lashes mere smudges of shadow over his faintly radiant cheeks.
I think I stared at him for as long as ten minutes, entranced by the vision he made.
Maybe he heard a noise; maybe he'd been slowly waking all along. His eyes opened, and then slid shut again. Then once more he looked up at me, and the most gentle smile crossed his face. "Trowa," he murmured, his voice husky with sleep.
I shut the door, and laid my jacket on a nearby chair. Then I went to stand over him, watching as he stretched, lithe as a cat, his arms flowing out above his head and his back arching and a tiny sigh escaping him. And then he was the sleepy child again, gazing up at me with such sweetness that I felt almost giddy.
Before I was even aware of the impulse, I was kneeling and taking his mouth with mine.
He was surprised, maybe too surprised to remember to push me away. I felt everything about that kiss in the endless seconds it lasted--the texture of his mouth, the heat of his lips, the slight dampness. I felt how he lay still, but not helpless or overcome. I felt how my own body had become curiously detached, as if nothing existed but that place where my flesh touched his, or where I had placed the very tip of my finger against his jaw. I felt his hair against my face, smelled its strange and heavy scent. I felt it all.
I pulled back, and looked down at him.
"Trowa," he whispered. Was there anything in his eyes, any emotion to read in the violet flecks dispersing the blue? I couldn't tell. He lifted his hand, in a motion that seemed to me impossibly languid, and brushed it so lightly over my chin that I barely felt it. Again all I could see of him was colour, the cranberry red of his sweater and the golden threads hidden among the chestnut locks that lay like silk all around him, loose from the braid. Even the whiteness of his skin was fascinating, and the flush of pink that friction and pressure had brought to his lips.
I was supposed to be the mystery.
I bent to kiss him again, little magnificent details striking in orderly procession. He did not pull away, though this time he was not surprised. He accepted me, his lips moved against mine, his eyes closed then opened to little langorous slits and he began to dart his tongue into my mouth, once twice again, and I could see everything with great clarity. Oh, and feeling it--I felt his arm, clad in brilliant threads, lift to embrace me by the neck, the fingers curling around my nape but not tugging me closer, moving through my hair and causing tingling sensations. I felt the tender swelling when I bit with more insistence into his lower lip. I felt his warm breath, soft and even, when his head tilted and he found my tongue and sucked lightly, lightly at it, I felt his wet heat and it did not repulse me.
Once more I pulled back, and he licked the sheen of my saliva from his lips, and he engrossed me.
He looked up at me. There was no question in his eyes that needed answering, no demand for more or anger at what I'd done, no confusion or fear or even lust, which I think I was feeling then, but in an almost reverent fashion. A kiss was just a kiss.
And how much just a kiss had been.
I left him then, and I believe he actually went back to sleep without so much as stirring. He said nothing to me later about it, nor did he watch me as if puzzled by my behaviour, which, as my mind began to clear of the vision of him, even I found disturbing. I honestly began to wonder if he'd been awake when it happened, or if I had only assumed he was.
After dinner, he lay on the couch, his slender body once more curled like a sublime creature from a Rembrant painting, eyes fixed on holier things--a television--his limbs perfectly arrayed around him and his immobility most illogically unreal. I sat beside him, and he looked at me, and I felt the impulse to touch him again, to see if he was only canvas and paint after all, to see if all his colour and brilliance was tangible. I wanted to feel his lips again.
He smiled at me. I think he knew what I was thinking. I didn't kiss him. The moment passed, and he turned back to his television, and though I tried to watch everything seemed blurred, motion too fast or too slow, except when I looked at him--where it was exactly as it should be. I wondered at myself, but mostly I wondered at him.
Around midnight, he rose and left the room. I heard him murmur "good night" and then the quiet pad of his feet on the carpet faded. A door shut somewhere.
I sat on the couch, and tried to memorise my already fading memories of his kiss.
I thought about him almost constantly. I don't know if he realised that--or even if I did. I did other things... was with other people... but Duo roamed my thoughts, and I would have strange dreams even while I lay in someone else's bed where he would sit beside me, that Rembrant angel who didn't match my familiar manic Shinigami in any way. One dream recurred often, and I worried often about it, trying to wrestle meaning from it and growing horribly frustrated.
In this dream, Duo and I were walking in a hilly little country, with nothing but yellow grass stretching out forever around us. Duo wore his hair loose, which of course he almost never did when I was awake, and it fluttered about him glowing in the setting sun. Such colours I saw in him. He was always colour in my mind, sharp and clear colours as if his shape could barely hold it all. We were not talking. I carried a lunchbasket, and he had a rolled-up blanket, and suddenly he would sit and declare in a voice that was too loud that we should eat now. So we laid out a picnic, eating sandwiches which had no substance and looked rather stale anyway, and Duo would point to the sky and say he had seen a bird, but there was nothing there but a few clouds.
His voice was always too loud, and he spoke so quickly, as if the words were tumbling over each other to get out and he couldn't give voice to them fast enough. He would gesture and there was restlessness in that, too much energy with no outlet and I didn't like to watch it.
It blurred him. His colours were smudged, they melted into each other, lost their brilliance. Then he would get to his feet and walk a little ways away, and I would simply watch him, as if I were only a passive observer who had no right to disrupt him.
Suddenly he would burst into movement, flinging up his arms and screaming a war-cry, and his hair would fly up about him looking black and flat in the moonlight and I knew he was Death.
Then he would return to me, and I would hand him another stale sandwich, thinking that if I could only keep him fed he would not do such disturbing things again.
I began to wonder if I was going mad.
I accused Duo in my mind. I blamed him for my bewilderment, my inability to comprehend him or even to say for certain that we had shared something--you see, I was in no way sure that we had. When had we ever shared *anything*? I remembered, though I knew he did not, the Sweeper boy who had come to the hangar where Heavyarms was built and had sought out another child, a boy named Nanashi, and he had kissed me, on the same impulse, I thought, that had made me bend to capture his lips. But was it the same? It couldn't have been. If it was the same, if he had felt the same irresistable pull toward me that I had felt that day when I came upon him sleeping and kissed him, then how could he have forgotten it? I knew that I was obsessed. I couldn't shake it.
There was a war, of course... time carried us apart. I even became a little bitter about it, and once, when we happened to meet again as enemies, me the OZ pilot of a prototype mobile suit and he a prisoner with a loud mouth, I hit him. I enjoyed hitting him. I don't even recall, entirely, what he said that made me so suddenly angry with him. Something he said to Heero, childish and playing his little games with me, with Heero whom I foolishly believed I was in love with, whatever it was set me off in sudden fury. I curled my hand into a fist and drove it with so much force into his solar plexus. Instantly I regretted it. His body sagged against me, trembling, and I held him up. I nearly fumbled when I placed the vid-recorder in his shirt. I couldn't think. I heard my voice; I was speaking, but I don't remember what I said any more than I remember what he said. I let him go and I walked away.
And I wanted to weep!
Of course I didn't. I left with Heero, my sometimes lover, and we battled Quatre, the little one, the serious young man who tried so hard at everything he did. I was injured grieviously... I floated through space and I dreamt of many things.
Oh, and more time passed--so did Marymaya, the unfortunate child, and I finally sent my Heavyarms to rest and with it, so I believed, my identity.
Duo stood beside me on a hilltop, the last explosion just a dull ringing in our ears, the wind of it wiping loose locks of hair into his face. "No," he said to me, though his eyes were still on the scattered remains of our dead partners, Deathscythe, Heavyarms, Sandrock. "You're still Trowa Barton."
I supposed I was.
Standing on the hillside with him I was suddenly reminded of my dream, with the inane sandwiches and the Death-pose. I think I expected something like that awful transformation to take place. I looked at him with something like trepidation.
But--Death he was not. He had become again the Rembrandt child, the holy being with fathomless eyes and contented stillness. Trowa still breathed--Duo had found a final grave for Shinigami. Like the Gundams, Death was no longer necessary. Was I? He seemed to think so, his words said that to me. We parted ways, but I was wondering.
I remembered with sudden clarity everything about him. The colours. The feelings.
I resisted for so long. But in the end, I went to him. I had to know again.
I did not have to look hard for him. He had told me long ago, after all, where to find him.
L2.
I stood in front of the little house that was his and I didn't like it. It was too dingy and unimaginative for him. I knocked on the door.
A woman opened it. She was young, with black hair, and a deep tan. She looked at me with suspicion.
"Is Duo Maxwell in?" I asked her.
She pointed silently at a nearby tree. Thinking her a little strange, I turned and looked. I saw feet dangling from a branch. I thanked her, and walked back to the great dead remains of what might once, long ago, have been an oak.
I was fascinated with the feet. I paused just inches from them, studying the long prehensile toes and observing the exquisite shape of the blue-veined ankles, finding even the dirt smudged on the balls and heels artistic. I followed the curve of the lightly haired calves upward into the petrified branches to dimpled knees, pale thighs, a dull yellow shirt and tangled chestnut hair that seemed to drip down like lush ivy across the wood. I saw his face, perfectly white skin in the shadows, and the beautiful jewel-like eyes that gazed down on me, chin propped up on a slender hand.
Silently, I dropped my bag, and climbed up beside him. He did not move to make room for me, but I discovered there was no need to--he was positioned so as to leave open an ideal seat that fit my long limbs as if made for me. I would have thought it almost planned, but I knew that it wasn't.
He smiled at me. "Long time no see," he said.
I didn't want to wait--I watched the movement of his lips and knew that I had to taste them--but I did. I leaned back against a convient branch, laid my head against it and looked at him. He was older.
Thinner--there was a hollowness to once full cheeks that I found pleasing, tiny lines in a face that had once been smooth that made him seem less an untouchable immortal, more a handsome man. His hair was unchanged, except that it was only tied by a loose ribbon and tumbled loose over his shoulders and down his back in a mass of thousands of individual, uniquely tinted hairs that no artist, even my Rembrandt, could have painted. And yet when I looked at him I could still see the two memories of him that I cherished so much: the lush, sensual Sweeper boy, and the sweet sleepy angel.
Shinigami was gone from him. All that remained of Death was the languid grace in his movements.
I laughed suddenly.
Duo's smile deepened. "What?"
"I'm happy," I said. "I'm here, and I'm here with you."
To this day I don't know why this moved him to kiss me. Certainly he had heard others say such things to him--and I had said them to other people. I don't mean to say that when I told him that, it had no meaning; it did. But for whatever reason, he took my hand, and touched his lips to my palm. I curled my fingers slightly, involuntarily, and brushed his cheek. A brief gentle jab of his tongue sent sharp tingles up my arm, and I shivered. Then he leaned toward me and he began to very delicately kiss my face.
I lifted my hands to hold his shoulders and held him. I was aware of the nubby texture of his cotton shirt, how the faded yellow had fallen in soft folds against the ivory skin of his thigh. I let my fingers trail the inside of his thigh as he applied his lips to the spot just below my ear and behind my jaw; I followed the smooth curving limb to the juncture at the hip and discovered the soft curls at his unclothed groin. My hand slipped inside his shirt and I felt the warm velvet of his stomach, of his chest, and all the while Duo was kissing me and his shallow even breaths stirred something in me, the pressure and sensitivity of his mouth finally finding my upturned lips and stopping all our explorations.
I don't know how long we sat there, still as statues, our lips just barely locked together, breathing together... together.
He whispered against my flesh, "This time, stay."
I did.
End Part 2
(:./erin/nanashi2)
