09-Sep-2004
Title: House Of Doves And Oleander
Author: CleverYoungThief
Rating: R
Warnings: yaoi, mild angst
Pairing: 4x3
Genre: One-shot/POV
Timeline: After Trowa stays with Quatre for the first time; One Year War
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Don't sue. College kids are like L2 kids;
we got nothin'.
Feedback: Please?
Note: Inspired by Amy Lee's cover of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box"... Don't even ask me why it's 4x3... I don't know what possessed me to write it.
Dedicated to: Moffit! ^_^
"He eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks... "
--- Nirvana, Heart Shaped Box
"Against my will
I stand beside my own reflection."
--- Linkin Park, Crawling
From the beginning, I didn't really know what to make of him.
After we fought, I waited for him in his wide yard, full of rich green grass even in the desert, like some kind of oasis. I felt the sun beat down on my shoulders, scorching. Colonists never really think about the weather until they come to Earth. It's separate from them, like the sickness of someone they don't know very well.
When I first saw him coming to me, I knew automatically that he was someone who didn't have a familiar association with the word "no". Everything about him was glittering and clean, swept like alabaster. His hair shone almost white in the intense sunlight, and his pale skin was a shock in a region of such swarthy people.
His blue eyes met mine, and at first I mistook them for gentle innocence. But they were fierce and direct, Aryan eyes, and I wondered briefly who had got into whose harem. None of the people here had eyes like that.
He talked so much that first day. He showed me through his great shining house. It was like a museum, as if no one really lived there, and I was afraid to touch anything. He showed it off in a way that was both endearing and unconsciously contemptuous. Every gesture of his hands embedded in my mind exactly who he was. A Winner.
Even his name spoke volumes to me, before I even got to know him. Winner. Someone who does not lose. The conqueror. I knew the family surname, of course. Most people did. Mining tycoons. Strict pacifists when it came to any kind of warfare, but it made me wonder–how many people had come to financial ruins at their hands? They were doves on the battlefield and cut throat killers in the boardroom. The irony of it was delicious to me.
I have been told I have a strange sense of humor. This may be true.
It did not take me long to realize that no matter what words he used to describe this Persian rug, and that ancient Chinese sculpture... he hated it. All of it. Beneath his light words there was a kind of scathing disdain. It wasn't directed towards me, although I might have thought so at first.
It was directed at himself. At who he was.
He had been to schools all throughout the colonies. Tutored in cool shady classrooms where he was the only student. When I was curled up in the back of a military transport truck in Russia, hands tucked beneath my armpits to keep my fingers from being frostbitten, eating rations out of heated cans around campfires, speaking the rough, dangerous tongue of the Cossacks, he was learning languages that are dead and chemical formulas he would never use.
While I killed as a child, he was probably studying in solitary. The only son of a great, sprawling family. The scion. Preparing to take over an empire that had nothing to do with borders.
He had nice things, and he hated them. I never had anything, and I wanted them. We were nothing alike, but I felt something for him, even then. It was like looking at some distorted reflection of myself. Unwillingly, I looked back.
Maybe even through all our differences–or because of them–we were both very much alone.
I knew all these things without asking him about them. I didn't need to. He had been left to tutors, boarding schools, nannies. He had everyone and everything at his disposal, even as a child. I had no one. And I wanted someone. You would think that a young man with both a colony and a country at his disposal could spare me a companion.
I realized something about him, that day. I realized that even though he had so much more than me, it made us the same. I didn't have a home, a name, or a life, but I still ended up having more than he did. No one would miss me when I died, but I was free.
He had millions of dollars, but he would burn it as if it didn't matter. He had many houses, but no home. Almost all the world knew his name, but no one knew what he was afraid of, or where he would go if his life was his own. What he would do with it.
Winner was not even his true name, I knew. It was standardized. I suppose Mufarrij Enterprises doesn't look very good on a billboard.
He was so perfect for what he was, I decided, sitting there across from me at a table, eating breakfast pastries. His movements were lithe and musical, overtly and unconsciously sexual. He ate like a cat. There was a bouquet of oleanders in the center of the table. They were beautiful desert flowers, white blossoms spilling over the edge of the intricate glass vase they were standing in.
But I know they are also poisonous.
I was silent, only putting in a word or a nod in the right places, but he spoke enough for both of us, hands gesturing as he explained things, blue eyes flashing like an aquamarine, arresting. He held conversation without mercy, terrified of awkward silences.
He forced words, lies, businesses, whole lives on me, sitting trapped and ignorant beneath his voice. It was as smooth as milk, but I could feel the passion and pain and rage beneath it, bright and blinding like oleanders. He gave me advice I could never have use for. He burned me with the knowledge of things I did not need to know.
I was a killer; that was all I needed to know.
He always changed subjects at just the moment I seemed about to understand him. When we played our instruments together, I could hear every note shake him to the core. I could almost see through to him then, but the song ended far too soon.
Also, I was afraid of what I would see. As far as I had seen in my life, nothing that seemed beautiful ever really was. At least, not completely so.
He spoke constantly, but it took me a few hours to realize that he had told me nothing of himself. It was the things he did not say that spoke to me. He spoke like I did–in the silences between.
He washed me in a brook of illusion, made his world and his life sparkle for me, and that was how I knew he wanted to burn it all to the ground. To wring the necks of every dove in the gorgeous white aviary behind his house and throw them dead to the bricks, loose feathers dancing on the breeze. To torch his fine Saudi tapestries, the books of ancient kuniform.
When he lead me to his bedroom–one of many, I supposed–I wasn't surprised that he wanted me. I could hear it in every breath he took, the way his hand lingered on my shoulder when he lead me from place to place. But he was an aristocrat, in name if not at birth; he would never admit that he wanted something he couldn't have.
So I saved him the trouble. I went to him. I wanted him.
He touched me like one of the statues in his great houses, reverent and detached, as if amazed that I was something he had never had before. His lips were as delicate on my skin as the kiss of feathers. I didn't want that, and I know he didn't, either. Not really.
I dragged my blunt nails across his back, my thumbs over his shoulderblades, gathering the silk shirt he wore under my hands violently as I pulled him to me. I mouthed the juncture of his neck and shoulder, then bit down, hard enough to mark him as mine.
He became a sandstorm in my arms.
I found myself buried in the soft down of his bed. His free hand touched off fire in me like sparks. His other held my wrists above my head. He trapped me with his words, first, and then with his kisses. I was immovable, paralyzed by his touch, neck arched.
I had marked him as mine, but I knew already that I belonged to him then.
Whenever his kisses became gentle again, I reminded him. I ripped his shirt off of him, felt the mother-of-pearl buttons fall against my chest, bouncing off to become trapped in the folds of his luxurious comforter. The bed smelled as if he had never even slept in it. I reminded him of what he was, and he reminded me of my place.
He pulled my shirt over my head carefully, gently, as if undressing a child, and I had to lean up and suck his nipple hard to remind him where we stood. They were as perfect as the rest of him, the brown of toasted almonds, betraying his heritage. Though I knew few had probably seen them. I doubt many people at all had seen him like this.
Turn out the lights, I told him. I did not want him to see the scars. I wanted him to feel them against his fingertips, against his heart, the same way I could feel his, even though he was virginal, untouched. All of his scars were beneath the surface.
He did.
And then we were just two shadows by a candle on the side table. He brought out oil that smelled like sandalwood, something that spoke of incense and alabaster stone, wealth I would never know, and there was something perfect about that, too.
I wanted to remind him that he was not perfect. That no amount of breeding or culture or money could make him what he wanted to be, or protect him from what he had chosen to become. That he was a soldier, like us. But mostly, I guess, I wanted to show him that it was okay. I understood. Because some part of us, no matter how different, was the same.
I arched my back when he took me, groaning. The comforter was bunched in my hands as I gripped it for dear life. His hands were soft against my shoulders, but they were callused, too. Something about that pleased me, made the pleasure even better. What pleasure there could be, anyway, in the guilt of taking yet another piece of his innocence.
This was the part I had to play. My harmony in the piece to his melody. It was the way I knew God to work. He panted softly in my ear, low Arabic sweet nothings, words I couldn't understand and had no desire to understand.
As he thrust forward with those words, one hand against my hip like a brand, he was finally speaking a language I could understand.
When he got closer–and he carried me with him, like a tide–he bit the back of my neck. Gently, but I gave him that one. It was as close to what I wanted as he would get, I think. I would never be able to bring out that side of him, the side that would kill the doves and set the mansion ablaze.
He needs to get rid of it, even now. It sits in him like some kind of poison, that hatred buried in his compassion, toxin in a desert flower, and I know someday it will destroy him. Or everyone around him.
But I didn't have the mind to think of that then. All I could think of was the feel of his heartbeat against my back, the way he whispered things I couldn't translate when he didn't even know my name. He didn't know my name, but he knew me, and that was enough.
When he came, I came, too. The experience was a revelation to me. It was like being hit with a desert, silent, dark, and exploding with heat. He whispered that he loved me, sinking sated against me in the blankets, and I don't even think he realized he said it. But I knew he meant it.
He trapped me with his kisses. His hand in my hair was a tightening snare, his intimate words were bait to me. I wondered if I would have to gnaw my own foot off to escape him, then wondered if I even wanted to. Maybe death in his arms was better.
I knew that I couldn't stay there with him, in that marble oasis, but I also knew that I would never be able to leave again, either.
Someday, I would come back. He wouldn't even expect it, perhaps. But there would be a day, if we both lived, that I would show up in his courtyard again, surrounded by the scent of wild jasmine and sweet grass.
I would be at his feet again then. Not because I had to bow to him, but because that's where I wanted to be.
Besides... someone had to protect the doves.
Owari
(:./cyt/house)
