23-Feb-2004
Title: It's Home
Author: RurouniTriv
Disclaimer: Oh, please... does anyone actually think they're mine?
Warnings: Can't really think of any... well, except POV
Notes: Written for the Ides Challenge (1x2x3x4x5 day)
It started out as fear, though none of us would have admitted it back then. After all, we were teenage boys, veterans of two wars (well, okay, one war and a major skirmish - I'm sorry, I can't consider something that took less than 24 hours to complete a real war) and heroes of the Earth Sphere. We couldn't be scared. Not of something as minor as, well... real life.
But we were. Utterly flipping terrified. Quatre was probably the least traumatized of us, since he hadn't really been on his own through the wars much and he had a large if somewhat distant family and the not-inconsiderable resources that went with that family. But even he had seen enough war and bloodshed that the idea of just stepping back into the fold and pretending he'd never been gone was just fundamentally wrong. Especially after the Barton Incident, when he knew what he was going back to: a world where assassinations were accomplished with words instead of weapons, where wars fought without bloodshed nonetheless resulted in massive casualties. One where his own sisters, who should have been his supporters, were often his most dangerous enemies as they battled him for control.
It was a battle that it tore at him to fight, a civil war that he fundamentally did not believe in. For all that his father had done to ensure a male heir, his experiences during the war had seen to it that he no longer believed that women were in the least bit "inherently inferior" as his father and culture had subtly indoctrinated him to believe. And without that certainty of his own righteousness... well, it didn't surprise any of us that he retired gracefully from the field after the Barton Incident.
Someone once said that the prospect of immanent death focuses the mind wonderfully.
In any case, he wound up arranging a settlement: he'd sign over his proxies to three of his sisters - ones who were respected by the family as a whole and hadn't been among the vultures attempting to pick his bones clean - and he'd take his share of the family's profits the same as the rest of his sisters, to use as he pleased.
It pleased him to buy an estate on Earth. One big enough to house all the Maguanacs, plus a quintet of Gundam pilots, with room to spare for families.
Heero was the first to join him, coming initially to complete the process of healing from the battering his body took in foiling the Barton coup. His recovery was complicated by the fact that he had a lot of old war wounds that never had healed totally right - if they had, he probably wouldn't have been in such bad shape at the end of the day to begin with. Even with the best medical care that money can buy, his bones will always ache in cold weather, and not even the most expert reconstructive surgery could undo all the damage. Maybe if he'd had proper medical care to begin with, back when he self-destructed, he might have made a full recovery, but by the time the Barton thing came up... well, the damage had set itself in to stay. Nothing anyone could do about it.
He hates the cold. Sometimes in winter, he'll just stay in bed all day and only emerge to piss and eat. Those days - fortunately rare here in Greece - we just leave him alone, checking in and making sure that he doesn't want for anything but otherwise letting him suffer in peace. It's been understood ever since we got together that when we go on vacation as a group, it will be to somewhere warm. He complains sometimes that we're inhibiting ourselves, but given a choice between skiing and a Heero who can move around without pain and will talk and sometimes even laugh... well, who needs skiing?
Heero moved in with Quatre, and never moved out. Given that he'd been supporting himself with odd jobs after the war and kept losing even those jobs due to his intimidating presence, it's not really surprising. The Preventers would have been happy to have him join up, but he was sick of fighting and turned them down flat. He formed his own little computer security company, doing everything online. No one ever met him face-to-face, so no one was made uncomfortable by his attitude. When circumstances demanded that there be a live meeting, he got Quatre to handle it for him.
I was next. I'd worked in the scrapyard with Hilde after the war, and tried to return after the Barton mess, but, well, Quatre wasn't the only one who found it hard to go back when he knew what he was heading into. But I didn't see a whole lot of other prospects that were any better, so I tried sticking it out. I didn't want to go back to the streets of L2, and I loathe charity.
I'd gone into the whole thing with my eyes wide open. I knew that Hilde wanted me, a lifetime on the streets taught me to read people well. But I figured it was just lust. We'd roll in the hay, she'd get tired of me, she'd move on and we could be friends. It wasn't until she started using the m-word that I realized how badly I'd miscalculated.
I haven't talked to her since the day I left L2. And before that... well, it wasn't really talking we were doing. For a while we were still having sex between screaming matches, but it had become really obvious that we just wanted different things, and we couldn't provide them to each other.
Women, I've found, have a hard time wrapping their minds around the concept of a fuck-buddy. And that was all she could be to me.
So anyway, I came to Quatre's to lick my wounds, and to start a new life on Earth. I mean, yeah, I may be from L2, but the only reason I went back after the war was because I had prospects there. Without Hilde's friendship - and her connections - well, why bother staying in a hellhole if you don't have to?
A few interviews told me that I wasn't going to be happy working in corporate Earth. A few more told me that running my own business was going to be effectively impossible - even if I had the connections to start up a new salvage business down here (which I didn't) and the money (which I also didn't), the competition was incredibly fierce and the rules for operating something like that were byzantine. Besides, I've always been happiest tinkering, so now that's what I do. I'm Preventers' equivalent of a mad scientist, puttering around in the lab and coming up with new tricks to keep ahead of the curve of criminal science. I was sent on a few missions back when I first joined up, but once Une realized that I was so good at inventing stuff, she decided that I was way too valuable to waste dodging bullets and assigned me to R&D. Quatre offered to create a lab in one of the vacant buildings on the estate for me, I wanted to be closer to the guys, Une was practically salivating at the idea of getting not only a happy researcher but a brand-new, state-of-the-art lab for free... well, let's just say that I work at home these days, and I like it that way. Especially since I can just wander out in the middle of the night if I get this great idea and not have to pass through ten checkpoints just to get to the lab.
Wufei, like Heero, came to recover. He'd taken a corner too fast on his motorcycle, trashed the bike, and damned near killed himself pursuing a fleeing suspect. Then, to compound his idiocy, he pulled a Heero, not giving himself time to recover, and put himself in the hospital again by pushing too hard and falling down some stairs when the knee injury he'd sustained decided it'd had enough and collapsed under him unexpectedly.
Quatre doesn't get mad often, but when he does, even Heero doesn't stand in his way. Wufei didn't have a chance. Quatre'd just marched in after Wufei's knee surgery with Rashid right behind him and picked the guy up, setting him down in the wheelchair that Rashid had brought with them, and the two of them had basically kidnaped him. After getting 'Fei home, Quatre'd laid into him, totally reaming him for his arrogance, stubbornness, and total lack of common sense. And then, as a coup de grace, he'd handed 'Fei over to Heero... who repeated the lecture louder, more detailed, and way more profane. And then I took over and verbally shredded what was left of him for being so dumb.
Wufei doesn't respect anyone who doesn't make him. He doesn't obey anyone he doesn't respect.
He obeyed us. That stupid he wasn't. And by the time that he'd recovered enough to go back on duty, he'd decided that he liked it with us. His request to be transferred to the Greek Preventers' office went through after only a month.
Trowa, for all that he was the one who came last, was the one who came with the purest motives. The rest of us had come looking for sanctuary, but Trowa'd come just looking for Quatre. He missed him, he had tired of the constant travel of the circus, and he'd had enough of Catherine's rather stifling affection. Not to say he totally quit or cut Cathy off, mind you - he still tours with them pretty often, but this is his home base now, not the town in Florida where the rest of the circus lives during the off-season. He's mostly a breeder now, taking advantage of the fact that this estate came with a small island in the middle of a lake to keep the cats secure.
We aren't holed up here like hermits. We aren't refusing to interact with the human race or going to waste - each of us has some way of contributing to the world, some kind of work we do that needs doing. Whether it's Trowa's work with endangered species, Heero creating new and better defenses for military and government computers, or the charitable foundation that Quatre created to help train and educate the people who'd been left homeless by the war, we all found a way to make a difference. And we all found our refuge here, in this estate that Quatre opened to us as he opened his heart.
We don't care what other people think about us. Whether they realize that we are far more than just friends and old war buddies. We know what we are. We know what it means for us to all be together after all this. Who cares what anyone would say if they knew what we get up to when strangers aren't around? It's not any of their business.
It's kind of uncertain who started this whole easy sharing thing that we do. You could say that it was Trowa, since he and Quatre were the first to have sex with each other. You could say it was me and Heero, because we were sleeping together before we ever had sex... I don't push myself where I'm not wanted, and Heero had no idea back then what he wanted other than companionship. I knew what I wanted, but it would have been wrong to try to seduce him when he trusted me to act in his best interests, and truthfully... well, I was still hurting a bit from how the whole thing with Hilde went down. I didn't want to hurt him the way that I hurt her, and I certainly didn't want to lose his friendship. I'd worked damned hard to get it.
But seeing what Trowa and Quatre had opened Heero's eyes. He started wanting that kind of closeness, that intimacy, for himself. And I was more than happy to offer it. I didn't want to be alone any more, no more than Heero himself did. Heero's got a reputation as a loner, but he's not, no more than I am... and that was my biggest fear going into the war, that I'd be truly alone. That something would happen and the Sweepers would be killed or they'd cut me off. They didn't, of course, but I didn't know them quite that well when the war started.
So in any case, we started out paired up, and then I'd found 'Fei alone in the garden one day and he was crying. Seems he was lonely. So I made him feel less lonely, and Heero, being Heero and having no more idea how normal relationships work than a fish has how to pilot a Gundam, didn't fly into a rage over the fact that I'd "cheated" on him, so 'Fei stopped feeling like he was intruding or "stealing" me. Especially after Heero'd basically tripped him and beat him to the floor.
It wasn't "true love" like the poets and the romance writers babble about. Losing them would not send me into a state of decline. But it was warmth and friendship and love and I admit it, I soaked it up like a cactus sucks up water, and when Trowa and Quatre decided that this thing that the three of us had going wasn't a threat to how they felt about each other and that the rest of us were pretty damned good-looking too... well, things became really comfortable then. We were complete, a balanced circle, each flowing into the other, giving and receiving without thought.
There are a lot of people who think that what we have together is just perverse and twisted and what have you. I mean, there's people who think that whenever two guys get together, and when it's not two, it's five, well, that's like exponentially worse.
What they don't understand is, it isn't about the bodies. It isn't even really about the sex, great as it is. It's comfort. It's safety. It's love and acceptance and caring and joy. It's family.
It's home.
The End
(:./rt/home)
