WAYSIDE by Hillary Fox

///Color of my hair is changing
My skin is soft too soft for a man my age
And I am never alone
Where is time taking me?///

When I look in the mirror these days, I can barely recognize myself. Somewhere along the line, I acquired a hairstylist and personal fitness trainer and in doing so acquired dark gold highlights in my hair and a workout regimen, never mind that I had been a Gundam pilot. As a result, a stranger with a pristine mask stares out at me from the mirror, from the pages of magazines and newspapers, from the television-this face is so perfect in its movement, the carelessly yet tousled-just-so hair that frames it and the stylish yet simple suit atop which it rests, that even its owner can't recognize it.

There are few things I can recognize anymore. Even my sisters begin to look the same after a while, and the Winner Enterprises employees… well, they've always been identical. Everything has blurred together into one huge, black-suited monster that looms in the darkness of the few hours of silence I can grab aboard shuttle flights, or lies in wait for me behind a boardroom door. I know that he's there, because he's become an inevitability in my life ever since I started out on my career as my father's successor.

My father's successor… I'm Master Winner now. Quatre Raberba Winner vanished the day he turned twenty-one, and hasn't been heard from since. Instead, there's a man with his face and body moving in the spotlight of the world's stage, trying to stumble through a crowd in the dark, trying not to cry out from the claustrophobia that strangles him-even in the dark, he has to put on a good face.

So when Master Winner gets a moment to himself and can look in the mirror, he sees a stranger staring back at him, worn and ragged, like everyone else. Who is he? Master Winner wonders.

Even in the absence of the hairstylist, I can't recognize myself, because it's times like those that my face is haggard and my hair knotted from sleeping poorly. Iria's threatened me with either physical restraint or tranquilizers if I don't sleep in a proper bed for at least eight hours, and there are times when I'm tempted to take her up on the offer. Sleep… it would be heavenly, I'm sure-real, honest-to-God, untroubled sleep like the kind a baby can have, when it feels safe in its mother's arms.

I never had a mother, and I certainly can't seek out anyone's arms to have them hold me. Sometimes it seems as if the Maguanacs would volunteer-Rashid, Abdul, and Auda have stayed, but the rest have returned to Earth to live out their lives as civilians. I envy them deeply, and I know that sometimes Rashid, Abdul, and Auda do as well. There isn't much here for them, just days of following me to meetings and dinners and receptions and occasionally trying to lift my spirits even though they're too heavy for even Rashid's considerable shoulders.

It is a hollow way to fulfill an oath given to a fourteen-year-old soldier on an unexpected battlefield. I've told them that, but they still won't leave.

Their loyalty brings intense shame upon me every time I think of it, because it reminds me of my great failing and the worst day of my life-when I left Trowa to re-enter my world of 'responsibilities' and 'obligations', forgetting in a haze of convenient resentment (which I hid at the time) that I had responsibilities and obligations toward Trowa as well.

Oh God, Trowa…

My heart twists every time I think of him, because I always think of that mother and child whenever I think of him. In our time together, just a few stolen months here and there, never more than a couple of weeks at a time spent together, we had been both things for each other. Some nights, after love, he sobbed out remembered terror in my arms or confessed his deepest dreams in the slow, shy voice of his that I knew would never vanish-and some nights, I would lie in fitful sleep, beset by dreams of ZERO and carnage, until he'd find his flute and begin to play, bending over me like a protective shield until I drifted off into oblivion.

///Nothing is real
This is how I feel
Nothing is wrong
But everything takes too long///

The day, like all the other anonymous days before it, dragged out into interminability. I moved through it like an exhausted man swimming through thick, sucking quicksand-there was a weight in me that grew heavier by the day. Meeting piled on meeting piled on appointment piled on antitrust hearing until I felt that I would either scream or break down crying by the time Robert Hassan, my vice president, picked up his briefcase and turned to go home... to his wife and four-year-old daughter and Kirby the Golden Retriever.

"Master Winner?" he asked, pausing at the door. I wished fervently that he would forget his question and vanish behind soundlessly swinging teak doors, but he didn't. Instead, he continued without waiting for my acknowledgment, "Have you ever considered taking a real vacation?"

"I went with Fatima and Jael's families to San Marco last month, didn't I?" I countered, pointedly not looking at him. My eyes scoured the desk, looking for something upon which I could fix my attention-the day's paper. I seized on it and, pulling out my glasses, began to study it avidly.

"Babysitting seven kids while their parents sunbathe doesn't qualify as vacation," Robert informed me, dryness twisting his words. Amongst the millions of faceless people I'd met and worked with, somehow Robert managed to stand out as someone with a personality completely external to the demands of office politics and international propriety. "It counts as unpaid slave labor."

"Well, Fatima and Jael had to babysit me often enough when I was little," I muttered. "Call it returning a favor."

"There weren't seven of you," my supposedly obedient and softspoken colleague informed me. "If you're going to call it an even exchange, then get six kids of your own and make them babysit them."

An unexpected pang shot through me at that thought. Six kids… I had never particularly wanted children of my own and hadn't ever planned on it. Children, a family-those things were what normal people had. Could the Winner Enterprises CEO ever have them, or could even his massive wealth (up to 5.6 trillion standard dollars, the business section informed me) fail to buy them?

But I *had* had a family, I knew, biting my lip against the impulse to shout this to Robert. I'd had Trowa, and even Catherine after a fashion. Trowa and I could have had six kids if we'd wanted-we could have gone to an orphanage and picked them out. Trowa and I could have had a family together.

Except… except…

"Is that all?" I asked Robert, dragging myself away from the 'excepts'.

"If I threatened to quit if you didn't take a proper vacation like a normal person-"

There was that word again, 'normal'.

"-would you take a vacation to keep me around?"

"I'd think about it." I gave the paper a couple of meaningful snaps and glared at Robert over the top of my glasses. "Now, is that all for the day, or do you have any more helpful hints or threats for me?"

"No, that's all for now," Robert sighed, stepping out and leaving me alone with the legion of my thoughts, and the specter of Trowa hovering behind me.

///How did this end up, me against you?
It's everything that I say
and everything you do
Your smile is changing
Where is time taking you?///

When I had left him that long-ago morning, it had been premeditated; I had known in some way that he couldn't leave the circus and the stability it represented for him, and I could never blame him for it. Yet, when he whispered his negation into my skin, I hadn't been able to stop brief resentment from welling up inside me-it was like a horrible confirmation, that he needed this small, safe, regular world more than he needed me. It didn't matter that I was asking him this tremendous thing, and had never given thought to *me* leaving *my* world and living with him. I hadn't questioned my absolutes in the way I forced him to question his.

Looking back on it, I hate myself for it.

However, I forced aside those thoughts in the moment, long enough to tell him that I had to leave in the morning-I don't think I could have stayed any longer than that night we spent together, a night that had passed too swiftly with us wound in each other's bodies, not moving until the alarm next to Trowa's bed went off. And then, oh how I moved, like the automaton I would someday become: I extracted myself from underneath Trowa, careful not to disturb him too much, took my shower, dressed, drank some coffee, kissed Trowa and then Catherine… and ran away as fast as I could go.

By the time I arrived back on my home colony in L-Four and got to my room to unpack, I realized that I had taken nothing with me by way of a keepsake. There wasn't anything I could find, nothing, nothing in the suitcase I'd brought back with me-not a little prize from the games on the boardwalk or a bit of dried flower or *anything.* Nearly incensed by the absence of any physical reminder of Trowa, I began to yank things from the suitcase, flinging clothes and shampoo and painkillers everywhere in my fury. Just when anger built to the breaking point and I felt I would break down sobbing from sheer impotent rage-

<<    >>
"Father, please escape!"

"Iria? Iria, *wake up*, please…"
<<    >>

--my fingers closed around something soft and blue that smelled of Trowa.

It was a t-shirt, worn a couple times between its last washing and my accidental appropriation of it. Numb, I sank down onto the bed and clutched the shirt in both hands as if it were an anchor, or a lifeline connecting me and my empty spiritless body to Trowa, who was my life.

<<Go back>> my mind whispered to me as I curled up, pulling the shirt up to my face and inhaling the essence of Trowa, gasping and dragging air into my lungs. The scent transported me back to Trowa, dissolving the richly decorated room around me, transported me back in time to one night we spent interlocked on his small bed, trying to be quiet for Catherine's sake.

With a will of its own, spurred on by the keen memory of Trowa's tongue and hands all over my body like fire, one hand wandered down my chest, trailing with delicious lightness over one nipple, backtracking a moment to twist and tease it through the fabric of my own shirt. Shivering, I willingly let pleasure overtake me as Trowa floated before my closed eyelids, head dipping down to press a fierce kiss to my mouth-I licked my own lips, straining up to meet an invisible tongue. His hand, my hand, toyed teasingly with the button and then the zipper of my trousers, pulling it over my growing erection with agonizing slowness. I arched my hips upward, my body curving desperately as it sought the sensation it craved.

My breath had grown considerably unsteady by the time I got my pants and boxers worked down enough to slip my fingers around my arousal-the feather-light touch, so like Trowa's, made me drag in a frantic breath of air, heavily Trowa-scented. I could feel his body moving over mine, close and imperative in its heat, his breath against skin and his hand beginning to move along my penis in long, even strokes, so maddeningly slow.

I heard my own moan of desire as if it came from down a long-dark tunnel, and my entire lower body dissolved in fire as Trowa's hand sped up its motions, pulling my body along with it, headlong into ecstasy. Faster and faster I thrust myself into his hand, disjointed words tumbling from my lips, my mind incoherent with lust.

"Come, Quatre," I heard him say into my ear, his breath hot and delicious.

"TROWA!" I cried, my body succumbing to his demand. I came violently, spasming as release hit me like a wall of white heat. Eternity stretched out as I rode the brink of ecstasy, the cry of his name echoing in the room and trapping me in it-the world of his name.

"Trowa," my voice whimpered back to me. "Trowa, Trowa…"

When I managed to open my eyes, Trowa's name on my lips, I saw nothing before me save the wallpaper and the damp t-shirt still held in a deathgrip by one hand, and I realized that the only Trowa in the room was the echo of my own voice. Broken, I collapsed into exhausted sleep, spent beyond the ability to cry.

///Nothing is real
This is how I feel
Nothing is good
But I don't mind being blind
If you don't mind doing time
Nothing is wrong
Everything takes too long///

The sensation of being spent and drifting in some ill-defined reality stayed with me for every day after that first day away from Trowa, but I pushed it from my immediate awareness under the pressure and glaring realness of the newfound spotlight. It never went away, but merely regressed to a permanent and ill-defined ache in the back of my heart like a permanent hole had been carved out-this was completely unlike my ucchu no kokoru, the whatever-it-was that had guided me through the war. Usually it was full to brimming with emotion, giving me life and incentive to stay alive whenever I felt the undeserving sorrow of another person.

But now there was something different, and my space heart clawed at me with merciless venom. The torture was the absence of what should have been there, but I could not dwell on it until exhaustion made me drop down into bed and fitful dreams, and then it came roaring back.

Whenever my dreams got a hold of me, they would refuse to let me go until the insistent clamor of my alarm or a staff member would release me. If I had been one of them, I suppose I would have been worried that I had developed such a strong attachment to blue T-shirts, and that one of them was looking sort of worn from being carted around all the time. Somehow, it was difficult to think of most of the staff as completely human; intellectually, I knew that many of them had families, were community-minded, had their own fears and hopes and dreams, but they always presented me with a difficult and frustrating dichotomy-when they came to work, it was as if they sloughed off the skin of the family or community member, and become something else entirely. Staring into their eyes, sometimes I could only see ambition or the blind circulation of facts and figures.

I hated that double-faced quality, mostly because I recognized it in myself.

Master Winner, the surprisingly competent and tough-as-nails yet compassionate CEO, the richest and most eligible man in the universe who has redefined the mulitcolonial corporation and the way commerce carries on big business. Quatre Raberba Winner, who can barely tell one dark-colored suit or no-nonsense haircut from another and wants to spend the rest of his life in seclusion with the one man to whom he is irrevocably committed but can never see again, because he's too afraid-and because Master Winner, with his responsibilities and obligations, won't let him.

One night-one of the nights during which Iria had threatened me with either incarceration or tranquilization, I lay helplessly awake thinking about that. I had spent the better part of two years (had it been two years?) playing with masks, putting them on and taking them off with practiced ease between each act of my life, the transition so seamless that I had long since ceased to be able to tell the difference between both sides of myself until I could find enough time to lie awake and realize that I had become the mask I had been wearing.

Lying awake, wearing Trowa's t-shirt, which stubbornly remained too big for me, I wished fervently that I could stop being this mask, that I could have the courage to strip it away and in doing so strip myself away.

<<You expected this of Trowa, and you were upset when he didn't have the courage for it>> a little voice deep in my mind whispered accusingly to me.

<<That's different>> I told it.

<<Really? How?>>

I spent the rest of the night wrestling with that question and the talons of dreams that sought after me and finally found me.

///Hey by the way
When I fell to your wayside
Did I crash, or just slide?
Hey by the way
when I pulled myself up to your wayside
did I hurt you, or just slide in?///

In my dream, Trowa and I are in bed. There's nothing important about to happen-it's just the two of us lying next to each other, close enough that the skin of one can half-sense the contact of the other, that kind of closeness. Trowa is lying on his stomach, his lean body stretched out like a cat's, and the dim light of his bedside lamp plays over the subtle dips and valleys of his ribs and the muscles of his back. As always, his ridiculous hair shades one eye, but the other watches me like a hawk despite the lazy half-light in it.

"What did you do today?" I ask him-I have just arrived that midafternoon, I remember, and I want to hear how things have gone with him.

"Not much," he says slowly, arching his back a bit to work at a tense muscle. "Fed the lions, cleaned the trailer, looked at my watch about two million times wondering when you'd get here… that sort of thing."

"Just two million times?" I inquire teasingly. I turn over and push myself up on one elbow, then bend down to press a kiss to his upturned face. His mouth accepts mine eagerly but with typical Trowa reserve, his lips warm slowly under my touch, moving in muted response until he eases into the kiss. It is always that way with him, but it is something that I love-it's as if each kiss is the first, each time I feel his body stirring into wakefulness under the influence of caresses and whispered encouragement, is the first for us.

We break the kiss after a long, delicious moment, and the light in his eyes has become laughing as he says, half-breathless, "Well, maybe three million times."

"Better…" Slowly, I move to straddle him and lower myself over his prone form, pressing the length of my body against his, fitting my torso against his back, lying atop him, skin against skin. A slow, deeply pleasured exhale shakes the beautiful body underneath mine, and Trowa begins to slowly grind his hips against the mattress. The friction of his taut, muscled form intoxicates me, and I begin to grate my hardness between his buttocks, kissing and licking at his quivering shoulder blades. He twists one shoulder up to my mouth and I nuzzle, nip, and massage the offered skin and muscle with my mouth, tasting the salt and bite of Trowa.

"Mmmm… more," he mumbles into the pillow, reinforcing the request with a twist of his lower body, bumping it up against mine.

Breath hisses between my teeth as he steps up his pace, determined this time to set the tone of our lovemaking. I follow him willingly, working myself against him until my entire awareness screams with desire for him and I can wait no longer; my hand fumbles for the lubrication lost somewhere in the sheets and, finding it I slip down Trowa's body and straighten to straddle him once more. His body is tense now with anticipation, moving in muted circling against the bed. Graceless, I squeeze the lube onto my fingers and then my cock, my slick fingers sliding first over my own flesh and then over his as I pull his hips up a bit.

"Quatre…" he says as I work my fingers into him and begin to stretch his body. His voice sounds oddly detached, as if he is about to ask me to pass the salt or wants to know what I want to do today.

"Love," I respond raggedly, removing my fingers and guiding myself into him, pushing past the initial resistance of muscle.

"Why did you leave me?" The words are perfectly steady.

"What-what… are you talking about?" The tight heaven of Trowa grips me as I rock into him, sheathing myself fully inside his body.

"You left me," he says, accusation painting his tone. "You left me because you didn't have enough courage to be *my* Quatre Raberba Winner, instead of the world's-you were afraid of them. 'There are a lot of people watching me, and I need to make sure that I don't give them any reason to distrust me, so I've got to be ready for everything'. Isn't that what you said that night?"

"Yes…" I begin to thrust in earnest now that his body has given way beneath mine. Sweat slicks our skin, and we slide together with intoxicating ease. My hands creep around his body, holding his hips so tightly with my fingers that I think I might just leave bruises. As my pace increases to the point where it feels that either he must break apart or I must be swallowed whole, still he speaks as calmly and evenly as before.

"Was it because you were afraid of your responsibilities to me?" he asks, no hint of recrimination there-he is now emotionless, just as he was before we were together. I am making violent love to an empty shell of a man. "Were you more afraid of them than you were of me, or were you more afraid of me than you were of them? Have I ever given you cause to be afraid of me, Quatre? Why can't you come back, or even invite me to come to you?"

My breath is gone as I work myself almost brutally against him, slamming inside his body with all the force my own allows. It would border on rape, but the form beneath me only moves and sweats with an exertion not its own; the green eyes of the man who once loved me don't even face me. I can't see Trowa's face.

"I want to come to you," Trowa said at length-would this never end? My entire being howled for release, but something was holding me back. "I want to come, but I'm afraid that I won't recognize you in your own world. Please ask me… I can't do it unless you ask."

There it was. Something triggered inside me and I released myself deep in Trowa's body. Boneless, exhausted, suddenly tired past all endurance and even past the ability to feel the ecstasy of my climax, I sank down atop him, wrapping my arms around the solid form that was suddenly as insubstantial as air.

///So this is how it feels
To get a little older
And some would say, wiser
We know what that means
Maybe not
Maybe that's what that means
Maybe not///

When I awoke the next morning, it was with a sense of purpose that I hadn't had in two years-for once, it wasn't directed to the company or the outside world, but inside myself. Filled with a sense of resolution, I got up and dressed while explaining myself, and a newly formed wild plan, to Robert, who seemed caught between relief and desperation.

"Of course I can call a press conference this afternoon," Robert said slowly, rubbing sleep from his eyes. I could hear his wife's irritable protestations in the background, and his dog barking. "That's not a problem," he continued muzzily, "but you just had this idea. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but this is the sort of thing that's best deliberated over the course of a few months so we can make proper administrative adjustments…"

"You can figure something out Robert," I said in my best encouraging voice. "Besides, we can say that this decision *was* reached over the course of a few months, but it was kept strictly between myself and you for reasons of… oh, I don't know. Reasons of something."

"Master Winner…" Robert rolled his eyes and adjusted his robe around him irritably. "May I ask what got into you to suddenly inflict you with a change of heart?"

"A dream," I whispered, so soft Robert had to bend close to the speaker of his comm. unit to hear me. "A dream did it."

Whatever Robert thought of that, he kept to himself and I was relieved that he didn't pry-maybe he thought I was finally starting to crack after two years of four-hour sleep cycles and too many meetings stuffed into too few hours, and was now actively hallucinating. He kept quiet and didn't ask questions, something that I always admired in him-the ability to not pry. Instead, he stayed by my side the rest of the day, going over my last-second speech and preparing to deal with the media hype sure to follow. The only time he left was when I had to step up to the podium to officially announce my decision to the business world and the public at large.

"Haven't you considered at least piloting WE through the end of the fiscal quarter? Your profits and productivity are up, and I'm certain your employees would like to see your fine guidance lead them to a record high in net gain for the fiscal half-year." An obnoxious reporter from a large news organization, and one who coincidentally owns stock in Winner Enterprises, who came armed with the ammunition he thought would guilt me into staying on.

*Piloting* WE… as if it were piloting a Gundam-which, of course, none of the people know about. Still, his words rankled, and my patience quickly evaporated.

"I'm sorry, but my decision is final," I said in my firmest tone, skewering the man with a flatly unemotional expression. "After two years of nearly nonstop work, I feel that my effectiveness as CEO of Winner Enterprises is beginning to be compromised, and with the company's best interests in mind, I have decided to take a short hiatus-a month or so, no more. The world won't end before then."

"Who's going to take over administration in your absence?" A skinny man in a pinstripe suit stood up in the front row, gripping his microphone as if for dear life.

"Robert Hassan will be supervising the day-to-day running of the corporation. He's been my right hand for two years, and knows the company almost as well as I do." The words tumbled from me, my mouth going on autopilot as I read off the notes on the podium in front of me. From the corner of my eye I could see Robert, who was standing in the wings of the stage, give me an encouraging nod and an exaggerated swipe of his hand across his brow.

"What are you planning to do over your vacation?" A woman reporter this time, one of the sly and annoying ones from the news magazines that tries to pass themselves off as informative and topical. "We hear that Cannes is wonderful this time of year."

Hint, hint. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

"I haven't decided yet. My first thought is to go to sleep for a bit," I said as flippantly as I could manage. In actuality, I had already decided; Rashid, Auda, and Abdul had all gone ahead of me to make preparations. When I told them my intentions, Auda had hugged me, Rashid had smiled a bit, and Abdul had said he was happy to see that I finally had some sense gotten into me one way or another.

Laughter broke out in the cramped, stifling closeness of the press room. Ahead of me, the banked rows of cameras and their lights hypnotized me; I stared at them, through them, seeking to project my way across microwaves and outer space and coaxial cables into a room-into one television screen where I might, looking out, see Trowa.

///Nothing is real
This is how I feel
Nothing is good
But I don't mind being blind
If you don't mind doing time
Nothing is wrong
But everything takes too long///

The first week of my vacation dragged with intolerable slowness as I waited and waited and waited some more, slowly sinking into something between despair and apathy. I had the run of the house on the desert colony created by my grandfather as a potential refuge to tormented people-my father had put in use sooner than expected, offering shelter to colonials and earth citizens who found themselves harassed by the Alliance. As I fled to it and hid myself within the walls of the house, the colony had become my sanctuary.

One morning I was out in the artificial desert, wandering aimlessly across a curving dune, my sandaled feet digging deeply into hot sand. My entire awareness seemed to expand, coaxed into openness by the nearly oppressive heat around me-my mind felt pleasantly numb, and before I knew it, I flopped down into the sand's embrace, spreading out my arms as if to gather the dune up into me.

"God this feels good," I mumbled, rolling over on my back. The artificial sun was dim through my sunglasses, and I pulled them off, closing my eyes at feeling the heat and light full on my face. "Mmph…" I turned over on my side, stretching a little bit and shivering pleasurably at the abrasion of sand.

"You're going to get sand in your boxers, and it's hell to get them out," Auda advised me from out of nowhere.

I started up, choking back a startled shriek. "Auda!" I squawked indignantly, scrambling up and straightening to give him my best glare. It didn't work, and I fumbled for my sunglasses, shoving them back onto my nose in the hopes of hiding my embarrassment. "Don't *do* that."

"Sorry," Auda said, not sounding quite sorry enough. He gestured to the Jeep waiting behind him. "But it's a good thing I found you. We gotta get back."

"Why?" I asked, feeling alarm prick at me. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Auda said quickly, grabbing my arm and hauling me back to the Jeep. "We just have to get going, that's all. Special delivery en route from the shuttle port, and Abdul thinks you might want to be around to see it arrive."

"Special delivery..?" Numbly, I let Auda plop me in the passenger seat and fasten the seatbelt, my mind turning over his words incessantly. I hadn't ordered anything, to my knowledge none of the Maguancs did, none of the few servants around the house had mentioned anything. No one was pregnant, I wasn't expecting my sisters, and I had told Robert that if anyone disturbed me, they would pay dearly for it. What was it?

<<Maybe it's Trowa>> a tiny voice suggested at the same instant that Auda said, "Trowa's coming."

I had expected shock, and I wondered why I wasn't bouncing around the confines of the Jeep like a crazy person-instead, I just sat there, quiet satisfaction welling up inside me, stretching my soul past the boundaries of my body. The last week had been spent in an unsuccessful attempt to find his circus, and now… well, now! My heart quieted a bit, happy with simply knowing that Trowa remembered me; it didn't matter what he'd come for, to love me or to curse me, but it only mattered that he was coming.

That happiness got me through the next hour of racing around, showering and getting myself cleaned up. Even in my excitement, I noted that Auda was right-it *was* hell getting sand out of my boxers. I had just finished my hasty self-inspection-Trowa's blue t-shirt, jeans, no shoes or socks-when I heard the security system announce that a car had pulled up in the drive, and I bolted down the stairs, pausing in front of the front door, trying desperately to control my breathing.

Performance… I had to drag this performance on for a little while. I drew a breath and opened the door, stepped out. All thoughts of performance vanished the second I saw him-the second I really saw him there, I knew I couldn't keep the wonder and disbelief off my face, it was just too much. He was *there*, really there as if I had harbored the unconscious worry that he wouldn't show up or that I had misheard Auda entirely. He was there, dressed in a loose robe to keep sand from getting into his clothing, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

I remembered the day he left my estate for the first time with that bag over his back, when I had given my name and asked for his. And here standing and watching him gaze at me, his green eyes trapping me, it was as if we had come full circle. He simply watched me a moment until I stepped forward and invited him in, not bothering to ask him if I can take his stuff-he never did.

And we never needed words to know things about each other. Only actions, a language spoken at a deeper and more elementary level… that's all we've ever needed. So, when I managed to actually say something once we got inside, it seemed superfluous.

"You made it." Painfully obvious, but the words fitted, oddly enough.

"I did," he answered. We stood for a moment more, looking at each other. His face was completely unbarriered, a riot of hope and fear, love, confusion, silent questions, more fear. Oh, Trowa… how could you fear? He's always been the braver of the two of us… He stood in front of me, terrified, but yet look at all the space he had crossed, the space between his world and mine, a wider gulf than any galaxy. He did what I had been too afraid to do.

And he did it for me.

I felt tremendously unworthy, knowing that he had found it within himself to forsake the stability of his world and give up the only family he had to be with a trillionaire who had left him out of fear what Everyone Else would think of him. He, completely contrary to his nature, had reached out and come to me. So, when we moved together as one and embraced, I felt him take me in, fitting my smaller body against his. My head rested comfortably in the crook of his neck, his cheek resting against my hair, the firm length of his body pressing with a reassuring solidity against mine.

"Quatre, Quatre…" I could barely feel his breath in my hair, and it struck me how insubstantial my name is-just a soft exhalation of breath through the nose as the 'r' is spoken. It's as if my name is a ghost, when he has been the elusive one these two years.

We have been ghosts to each other. I remembered the dreams of him, his tactility fading into nothingness as morning came and the dreams ended. In the haphazardness of our life together, the permanence of the moment, and the promise it held, was so startlingly different I began to cry-it was as if this life of chance meetings, brushing fingers in the dark, encounters as random as dice, had ended, and a new one hovered on the brink of being born.

"Trowa… don't leave me, please…" I gulped, desperate to reassure myself of this. I couldn't help my tears and didn't want to. They spilled down my face, born of joy, self-recrimination, disbelief, wonder, acceptance… and love. Most of all, love.

///Hey by the way
when I fell to your wayside
did I crash, or just slide?
Hey by the way
when I pulled myself up to your wayside
did I hurt you, or just slide in?///

We had long since abandoned all decorum, stumbling upstairs like wild, desperate animals and stripping without any thought to tease or play-Trowa's flung his duffel bag over into a corner, and I think I heard glass breaking, but I don't particularly care at the moment.

Limbs wrapped around each other, we fall into bed together, rolling around and kicking the covers off. Trowa has forsaken going slow; his body writhes excitedly beneath mine, chafing and seeking the contact I eagerly give him, my hands flying over his skin, devouring every twist of muscle and scar, hot with memory, exultant that even after two years, he hasn't changed.

He is still my Trowa, and I am always his Quatre.

And we've never needed the words to say it. The kiss I give him, hot and impassioned, my tongue snaking through his mouth, greedy but also giving as his mouth responds, tells him that. It seems as if I will sink into him even before we couple, the heat of our foreplay will melt us together. He moans into my mouth as I massage his chest, torturing the sensitive nubs of his nipples-he breaks the kiss to tilt his head back in ecstasy, his body arching up into mine, and I attack his neck, heedless of the red, angry marks I leave. As only he can do, he's maddened me past my endless equilibrium, and his need infects me. I can't wait any longer.

I slip my fingers into his mouth, and he licks at them, running his tongue over the salt and sweat of my skin. Shivering in anticipation, I wait as he gazes at me with passion-hot green eyes, his face unfettered in its sensuality, until he relinquishes those now-slickened digits. As I begin to open him, reaching between his spread legs and brushing across his penis, his eyes closed and his mouth opened a little, enough to let a litany of soft, half-whispered pleas tumble from his lips.

"Quatre, Quatre…" he whispers over and over. My name reaches between us, questing.

"Trowa," I gasp out, beginning to loosen him. He works himself down on my fingers, rotating on them with muted twists of his hips. The heat of him is almost too much-he's almost there, and so am I; my own arousal howls for release. "Trowa…"

Our names intertwine, binding us together as I remove and quickly clean my fingers and, fumbling, falling over myself in my haste, I enter him. There is tightness and resistance, and there is pain; it sits between his eyes, his body having gone two years without having this done. Mine has, too, and the sensations are so acute I can barely believe it-the heat, the unrelenting grip, the ecstasy, Trowa's skin, the brightness of him… all of it is amplified, burning away the dry husk of memory and dreams.

I sink so deeply into him I can't go any deeper, seated inside a body that for all the time away from it is as familiar to me as my own. His long, beautiful legs wrap around me, keeping me trapped inside him-as if I wanted to leave him. Lying like this, even before I begin to set the pace that will bring us to our conclusion and our beginning, I know I will never leave him again.

///I believe in love
I believe in love
I believe in love
I believe in love…///