To Protect
Chapter Four: Tiger Love
First part of the "Butterfly" Arc

You could learn a lot about a person from their eyes.  Catharine Bloom had always known it, but there were different ways of knowing.  There was the knowing that you did with the mind and there was the knowing that you did in the moment, as you stood there, knife in hand and waiting to fly.

It took guts to be that clown, but the Gundam Pilots all had guts to spare.

Watching Wufei stand perfectly still against the thick boards, the crowd’s cheering not yet fully dulled from the first knife’s, as usual, perfect aim, slammed into the boards near his right hip, she couldn’t help but wonder what brought him here now, not to L-2 in the middle of a cold February where the heated tent of a circus was the only form of escape from the harsh winter, but to this circus, against those boards, letting go of his legendary pride to play the role of “clown”.  That is the “here” that Catharine was curious about.

His eyes didn’t hold a prayer for death as Trowa’s had, so long ago.  There was something else in that endless obsidian, something much quieter, with something in them so straight-forward…not the eyes of a lion like Trowa’s were—these were not the eyes of a man who would spend a life taming beasts.  No, Wufei, she had learned quickly, was not so patient.  He was a beast himself, untamed and possibly untamable.  He was called the solitary dragon, she knew, but she had never met a dragon.  Instead, she remembered that they had had a  tiger once, a cub who lost its mother at only a few weeks old in the wild.  Having no real human contact in the first year of its life, it had become skiddish around people, determined to survive on its own.  They’d eventually had no choice but to set it free to keep it from killing itself with stubbornness.  Wufei reminded her a bit of that tiger.  She wondered if it had lived through the cold winter now.  ‘That tiger survived, definitely,’ she told herself for many years.

But forget the tiger. THUNK.  Wufei’s eyes were reaching, desperately reaching, trying to say something.  THUNK THUNK.

Two knives slammed over either shoulder.  He was a good target; he didn’t’ flinch at all.  No, those eyes weren’t praying for death as Trowa’s had been at all.  More true, it seemed, was that death had lost all meaning to them.  A tired soul, she saw there, one for which grief was heavy and all words had been exhausted.

‘Oh Wufei…’

But there was something else there, as their eyes locked for a moment, that she couldn’t place immediately.  As the last two knives thunked into the wood to either side of his head, ruffling his hair slightly from the impact, she suddenly realized, ‘Wufei, is there someone…that you love?  That’s it, isn’t it?’  That longing couldn’t possibly be anything else.

Wufei was awed by her.  Even as the two clowns helped him down from the target, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just witnessed the most amazing thing in the world.  After the second knife, he had no worry at all that he might be hit.  For this sort of job, he understood, he had to do something he’d never done before—trust—to trust her completely, even if she hated him, even if she killed him, even if none of this made any sense and he had no idea what he was doing (other than most certainly not acting like himself),  even then, he could not help but be in awe of her skill as he played the part and bowed to the audience.

*#*

Backstage, he removed the mask and placed it on the dressing table, reached up to remove the clips from his hair and grab a brush and elastic to pull it back into it’s customary ponytail.  After a long pause, he spoke.

“Where did you learn how to do that?”

“From the person who used to do it,” Catharine answered, turning to face him and leaning back against her own dressing table, stricken by the smooth hair hanging into his face.  “Manager adopted me after my family died.  I’ve had a lot of time to learn things and the previous knife-thrower was getting old, wanted to retire, so that’s what I was taught.”

“Oh.”  ‘Sorry for asking,’ he thought.  And the woman understood.

“What about you?  Standing still so easily, from your kung fu?”

“I suppose so,” Wufei replied.  “You know a bit about kung fu?”

“I think Trowa said you studied it for a very long time, but I don’t really know much about it, no.  It’s been very many years?”

“Most of my life.”

“It’s like me and the knives then.”

“It would appear so,” he replied.

“Well, it’s not so bad, right?” Catharine said cheerfully.  “I won’t be throwing knives at you forever!”

“I should hope not.”

*#*

Michael looked at Manager and smirked knowingly.  “It seems as if it’s warming up at last!” he joked.  “I think the spring thaw will probably come in suddenly this year,” he chuckled.

“It just might.”

“What do you think of it all, Manager?”

“I think the crowd is more entertained when Catharine’s target is a handsome young man.  Now stop being so nosy.  You’re up next.”

“Aye aye Cap’n!  I shall not abandon ship!”  the gymnast saluted and ran off.

“Maybe I should have hired him as a clown instead,” Manager sighed.  Some people just never learned.