Lovely 10
Lovely 10
Series: Gundam Wing
Characters/Pairings: Duo, Heero, Wufei, Quatre, Trowa, Duo/Heero
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Slash.
Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast. When someone stumbles into an enchantment hidden deep within a forest, he trades his life for the lives of one of his slaves... 1x2 shounen-ai.
Author's Notes: My eternal thanks to my incredible beta, Lady_Friselle. She is fantastic beyond words!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
FFnet link
Lovely 10
oOoOoOo
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air.
--from “To Earthward,” by Robert Frost
oOoOoOo
Something in the air had changed, Duo thought. It was starting to feel more comfortable, oddly enough, around the castle, even in the huge, echoing vaults of the dining hall, the main one.
He was starting to talk with Heero, talk comfortably with Heero, while they ate dinner. That was the key word-comfortable.
Something had changed, or maybe broken, and he liked the difference. He was starting to feel like he had a home again. And his homes had always been people, instead of places.
oOo
“Hey, Heero! Great to see you,” said Duo. He was always enthusiastic when he greeted someone, but he didn’t always mean it. He did, this time, and he did most of the time, now.
Heero nodded stiffly and his lips curved, just slightly, into something that could almost be a slight smile. His own greetings had warmed considerably, when it came to Duo.
Something had changed.
Heero had accidentally hurt Duo, and Duo had hurt him back, and Heero had apologized, and meant it, and shared his own painful memories to help right the imbalance. And Duo had accepted.
And they had walked side-by-side into the castle, huddled against each other, human body tucked close against inhuman one, heavy claws brushing against delicate, fragile skin and longer legs forced to slow, and both of them nearly afraid and just as much something else.
They hadn’t really touched each other since. It wasn’t noticeable, not all the time, because they’d never touched each other before, either. But they could tell.
When they accidentally brushed against each other, they could tell. And when there was the opportunity for one to reach out, even just to lightly touch a hand to a shoulder to make the other turn or pay attention, they didn’t, but they both recognized the opportunity.
And they talked. They hadn’t, before.
So Duo could mean it when he greeted the other. Heero noticed-he could hear the slight difference, and it was nearly obvious, now that he was getting to know him, and he knew his own greeting was friendly. Maybe something more. He didn’t know, didn’t know if Duo knew, if anyone knew. If there was anything to know.
“It’s good to see you,” Duo continued. “It’s been a few days-excluding dinner, of course, but you knew that, didn’t you? Hey, want to do something today?”
Heero sighed. “It’s raining,” he pointed out, because ‘doing something’ invariably meant being outside. Duo liked to be in outdoors as much as he could, Heero knew by now-a side effect of years of imprisonment. He hadn’t escaped unscathed, even though he’d never been beaten that badly, really.
“No, Heero, it’s not raining,” said Duo, sounding amused and affecting a lecturing sort of tone. “Rain implies things like ‘raindrops’ and that means space between the various little bits of water. …As opposed to this, which is a vertical river. Covering the entirety of the grounds and then some. What it is doing is not ‘raining.’ Pouring, maybe, or sheeting, or flooding…”
Heero made a faint noise of amusement. Bright violet-blue eyes turned to look at him happily.
“But we could goexploring!” he finished. “Inside, at least. I still haven’t seen most of the castle. This is a damn big place you’ve got here, you know.”
Heero looked at his friend-at his friend, at the person his curse, his mistake, had imprisoned, at the person who was here in case he would say ‘yes’ when Heero asked him if he would marry him, at the boy he might someday love and who might someday love him back, and that was startlingly real-feeling, now, more possible seeming than it had been with anyone else, ever before; Duo had stopped flinching when he unexpectedly found Heero around a corner or when he was suddenly looming out at him from what had been empty shadow a minute before; Duo had stopped having even the slightest reaction, or having any carefully managed non-reaction.
Heero looked at his friend warily. He did like spending time with Duo, more than he liked to admit. He had started actively seeking him out, outside of the hour or so they spent eating together every evening. But there was a big difference between enjoying his company and enjoying the incredible amounts of trouble Duo seemed to attract. It was like metal filings to a magnet.
“Awww, don’t be like that,” said Duo, mock-pouting, a slightly wicked glint in his otherwise guileless eyes. “You know I’d get lost and devoured by dust bunnies without someone along to help me.”
Heero sighed, but he knew Duo’s heart was set on doing this, now, and while he might not be devoured by animated dust animals, he was the sort to end up falling in one of the siege wells, or falling through a rotten board and breaking his leg, or probably any number of disasters he couldn’t think of, because nobody would come across them under normal circumstances. Unless they were Duo.
“Fine,” he said, voice slightly testy, but he thought-although he wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t sure what it meant-that Duo could hear his interest (because Duo was, invariably, no matter what else you said of him,interesting) and his lack of sureness and his slight, careful concern.
Duo whooped loudly. “Yes! There’s nothing else to do, and Trowa, Quat and Wufei are being boring-” Heero translated that to mean that they were going over the records the castle had; Quatre loved looking back at the politics-his own family had records just as old and nearly as biased, although in the other direction-and Wufei was happy to show them to him. Trowa stayed around for the chance to give his opinions as to what those decisions must have been to the rank-and-file. “-so I was really hoping you’d be willing to do something. Some things just aren’t as good on your own.”
Heero felt a slight twinge of guilt, and forcefully shook it away. It was ridiculous. He didn’t owe Duo his time, and gave a considerable portion of it to him anyways-with dinner and checking in at least once or twice a day and other things, he spent more time with Duo than he did with anyone else, than he had with anyone else since…
Since before he could remember. He’d never had friends, really, although he’d had a few playmates when he’d been very young.
“Let’s go!” said Duo, bouncing just a little on the balls of his feet, wide smile spread across his face. Heero forced away a half-formed comparison to the sun on a half-cloudy, wind-blown day.
“Where?” said Heero dryly. Duo made a face at him.
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in that you know what I’m doing and I don’t…”
“What we’re doing,” corrected Heero, and that little reminder that he was doing this, too, somehow meant a lot.
oOo
Duo shivered, just slightly. It was cold where they were, in the very deepest depths of the castle, the floor beneath the basements, hewn right into the earth, and he hadn’t worn enough clothes. It had been one of those deceptively balmy days, aboveground, but the earth still had the chill of winter clinging to it-although they were deep enough that it would probably never be truly warm.
He ignored the cold in favor of poking his head into the next room down the hallway. He’d assumed it was going to be just another dusty little storage room filled with bits of potentially useful detritus someone had decided to save in favor of throwing away, but the heavy wooden door was considerably more ornate than any of the others had been; a lot of them hadn’t had doors at all. There was some sort of faded gilt symbol set into the wood.
“Hey, look at this!” he called over his shoulder to Heero, who was a little ways behind him. Fascinated-he’d never been able to resist a mystery-he tried the latch. The door refused to open.
“Let me try,” said Heero’s voice behind him, and he moved aside-he was, pretty clearly, outclassed in terms of sheer physical strength.
The door still refused to open, even with Heero’s full strength behind it-and that was enough that the thing should have broken down, even if the latch still refused to turn.
“Huh,” said Duo, intrigued. There was nothing like something you couldn’t look at to awaken curiosity. “And look… I wonder what this is, on the door.” He brushed at the thick layer of dust and cobwebs that had covered everything down here-including himself and, especially, Heero, whose fur coat only made things worse-and then scrubbed at them harder, slowly revealing the almost-entirely-faded gilt design pressed into the half-rotten wood of the door.
It was a stylized rose, was his first thought: you saw a lot of roses worked into chairs and picture frames and tapestries and stair rails, around the castle, for some reason. His second thought, enough to make him shiver, was that it looked like magic-the little glinting half-metallic particles, forming waves as they radiated away from their source, over- and inter-lapping: the healer’s fierce, hot-burning bath, or what was left before and after an illusionist started or ended his display, the raw material of pattern and design, or the bruise-colored, plague-colored tide that had filled the city and everyone in it, even though nobody had been able to see it-
Heero was tense behind him. Duo looked back at the man standing behind him, flashing him what he hoped was a cheerful grin-he didn’t feel particularly like smiling, or even forcing a smile. It probably hadn’t worked. Heero blinked at him, then tried to smile back-a real smile, not the little twitch of the lips he’d given him when they’d met that morning-and the sharp canines didn’t even phase him anymore. They had, the first time Heero had smiled at Duo: with his face, the expression looked more like a snarl, a threat, than anything else.
And Duo knew that Heero knew that. He strongly suspected, even if he couldn’t prove it, that Heero had tried to keep himself from smiling (not that he was naturally given to it, even at the best of times) around any of them: Duo, Quatre, Trowa, even Wufei. He’d made it a point to encourage smiling, after he’d realized that. And Heero did smile at him now. Not often, but often enough.
“I wonder why this is down here,” said Duo finally. Something, anything, needed to be said. “I mean, this clearly doesn’t fit in with all these other doors. I wonder if there’s a reason?”
“It might have originally fit another room,” said Heero. “One that got a lot of use, and was in plain view, and so it got decorated. And then it got replaced for some reason, and so they fitted it to one of these rooms down here, instead of just wasting it.”
“Maybe,” Duo said, shrugging. He ran his fingertips over the innermost ring of petals imprinted on the door, shivering slightly, the hair on the nape of his neck prickling. He shook his head to push away the feeling, and turned to look at Heero again.
The lord of the castle was looking considerably larger than he usually did, hair standing on end, as oddly disturbed by the door as Duo was, and Duo half-hesitated, then ran a hand briefly down Heero’s arm, smoothing down the thick fur. Heero started and Duo pulled his hand away, quickly, and looked to one side-there was something there between the two of them, but they didn’t… Didn’t act like they actually were dating, even within the odd, forced, yes-we-are-considering-each-other-as-romantic-partners-kinda sort of situation they were in. They didn’t touch each other.
Softly, Heero ran the back of his own hand along Duo’s arm, the one closest to him, mimicking the gesture, knuckles just barely brushing skin, and Duo shivered again, turning to meet Heero’s eyes. They both looked away again, quickly, after their eyes locked for one quick second.
The eerie mood the mystery and the door had created was broken, though, replaced with awkwardness and unsurety. Duo let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and brushed a hand over the gilt inlay again, letting it fall to the handle again, pressing down on it again, uselessly-
He was walking up the dripping-wet and cold-cold enough that he could see his breath-stone passageway behind the door, walking up and up the rough stairs, himself but also not himself, and somehow he could see even though there was nothing and he was walking and pulling the air of the tunnel into himself, breathing it in and out of his lungs, taking it into who he was, and then he was stepping out of the tunnel, breathing that air into the outside atmosphere-it was late evening, dusk slowly gathering-and he was in the garden, in a garden, one he half-recognized, but there was a pond; it was frozen and he was looking into it, walking out onto it and spreading through it.
-The vision hit him with enough force to drive him to his knees, gasping, lungs and muscles burning, not like cold or heat but like acid had been driven through his bones. Heero was hovering over him, not quite daring to touch him, but the worry making his eyes wild, and the sheer strength of it burned the image into Duo’s mind. He reached out with one hand, shaking helplessly with pain and the aftershocks of the vision, and with his deep, needy gasps for air. He needed to touch something real, needed Heero’s support.
For a minute he thought that he wouldn’t touch him again, and he understood that, accepted it. But then Heero was reaching out, laying one huge hand underneath Duo’s arm, supporting it, and pulling himself down, on his knees to match Duo’s collapsed position, not that he would, built the way he was, and then he was pulling him into an embrace, warm and too tight for comfort, almost too tight to bear, and Duo reached one shaky arm, the one that wasn’t being held by him, around him in return, holding on hard, tightly enough to keep the limb from shaking with anything more than the faintest tremors.
After a minute, Heero seemed to remember his strength, remember who and what he was, and he loosened his grip so suddenly, so quickly that Duo almost let go entirely, so that his friend could have the room to push himself away. But Heero didn’t let go, instead shifting his grip to something almost excruciatingly delicate: the faintest hold, barely exerting any pressure at all. Duo was half relieved-his hold had been verging on painful-and half disappointed; he needed the closeness, the reality and immediacy. He pressed himself closer instead, burying his face into Heero’s clothes and the loose spill of his hair, partly to keep himself from needing to look at the person he was clinging to like a child, a distraught preteen girl.
He was relieved when Heero’s arms pressed closer again, no matter how cautious he was still being-it was better than that butterfly-light too-cautious hold he’d had before. He felt his heart slow and the pain that had invaded his limbs fade to fizzing numbness, like they’d fallen asleep, and then back to something normal. He felt tired, more than exhausted, utterly wiped out, by what he’d gone through. Only the last of the adrenaline in his system kept him from dropping off to sleep right there, still clinging to Heero, both of them kneeling on the rough dirt-and-stone floor of the basement they were in, in front of the door that had caused this.
“I’m sorry,” half-whispered Heero at last, voice heartbreakingly sincere and, inexplicably, afraid, as if he thought that Duo would lash out at him again. The words rumbled through Duo, the way he was pressed against him, held cradled to his chest; he shivered at the intimacy of the feeling.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Duo half-whispered back. “Only one of us insisted on going exploring.”
“You are a-a guest,” said Heero, voice wavering and nearly breaking, because Duowasn’t a guest. He was a captive, a prisoner; he’d been torn away from the world and forced into this unreal half-existence, forced to keep company with a monster who was supposed to be courting him. “It’s my duty to keep you safe in my home.”
And he had failed in that duty. He didn’t know what this door was, but something about it unnerved him; he feared it, or what it symbolized, or what it was holding back. Something about it was-was wrong, in the way that he was wrong; inhuman, dangerous, monstrous. A changed, warped reflection of what it should be.
“No,” repeated Duo, stubbornly. “It’s not your fault, Heero. I don’t blame you. If I blame anyone, I blame myself, but you didn’t know this was down here, did you? Whatever it is, it just didn’t like me. You know how powerful magic can get-halfway to having a personality of its own, and belligerent as fuck. If it’s anything, it’s me-I have the worst luck, you know.” Duo was relieved that Heero still couldn’t see his face: he knew his expression wouldn’t be-happy. Duo knew his luck. Heero didn’t, though… And he would have blamed himself, assumed that Duo was just trying to cushion hurt feelings, even if he did know. And he didn’t.
The two were silent for a long, slow moment, the only noises the slight creaks and rustlings Duo and Heero made, as they shifted slightly, trying to find more comfortable positions-nearly impossible with the way they were kneeling wrapped around each other.
After a minute, Duo sighed heavily. “You should be somewhere you can rest,” Heero said before he could say anything.
“Okay,” said Duo, submitting without much of an argument-it was true and some deep-down instinctual part of him knew that Heero needed to protect him like this, give him the little help he could. He tried to make it to his feet and couldn’t, collapsing as he got halfway up. He spat out a curse.
“I hate being so weak and helpless,” he hissed through gritted teeth, glaring at nothing.
“You’re not weak,” said Heero quietly, and with a conviction that surprised Duo out of his frustration, making him turn to look at the other man with surprise.
“What?” he said, on automatic-he’d heard just fine, and it wasn’t like it was a hard sentence to understand.
Heero shrugged, but didn’t contradict his statement, or add any qualifiers. “Let me carry you,” he asked instead, and he sounded almost hopeful.
“Okay,” said Duo again, almost warily.
But it wasn’t embarrassing, or humiliating. He hadn’t been expecting that. He wasn’t some swooning maiden suffering corsets for fashion’s sake, and he didn’t like to be treated like one, but he wasn’t. It was… Surprising.
He felt like Heero’s equal, even when he was being carried by him because he’dcollapsed, despite the ridiculous differences between them when it came to size and strength and physical capability.
And it was-surprisingly nice, to still be touching Heero. To still be holding onto him, and to have him holding on in return.
It had been a long time since he’d really had any physical contact with another being, let alone for this long, or this closely. Never with the connotations this had-never with this situation, any of its permutations: never with a suitor, for lack of a better word; never with someone who’d held him captive, thank any listening gods; never with someone like Heero.
Never with this much-trust. He trusted Heero, at least a little. He didn’t know how much.
oOo
Duo had been asleep for hours when a persistent knocking on his door slowly dragged him back to the waking world.
“Nngh. Wh’s’t?” he mumbled, still exhausted. The vision, the hallucination-whatever it had been-had made him more tired than he had known it was possible to be.
“Heero,” came the answer, and the lord of the castle sounded hesitant, self-conscious, too-aware of what he was doing, whatever it was.
“H’lo, Heero,” Duo yawned. After a minute he added, belatedly, “Uh, you can come in, you know.”
The door was pushed open carefully, and Heero padded silently into the room, looking cautious.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Tired,” said Duo immediately. “But much better.” Some hours of sleep had certainly helped with that. Belatedly, he glanced at the clock-nine in the evening or so. That would explain why he was so hungry; subconsciously, he placed a hand on his empty stomach.
“I’m glad,” said Heero, the rote niceties coming to him automatically, but Duo couldhear the real emotion behind the words.
“…oh!” said Duo suddenly, after a brief second’s pause, realizing why Heero must be here: it was past dinnertime. The curse required that they eat dinner together, every day; apparently illness (or the side effects of mysterious doorways, at least) wasn’t any excuse. “Dinner. Of course! I’m sorry. Uh, if you’ll give me a minute, I can get dressed-” I can probably get dressed, he added, silently, to himself. He’d still been weak as a newly-born kitten when Heero had dropped him off in his bed, and he hadn’t really tried moving since then.
Heero shook his head, expression clouded with something but not anything that Duo could clearly read. “No,” he said, “You should stay in bed. Rest is good for these things.” It was too, Duo knew.
“But what about…?” Duo began. He knew that the castle had given him seven levels of Hell the one time he’d tried to escape his duty, but he didn’t know how it would react to its lord doing the same.
“I brought dinner,” said Heero abruptly, voice rough, looking determinedly to one side. “If you’ll let me stay, it should be enough-” He broke off, then began again. “I don’t want to impose, but the curse…”
“Its fine,” said Duo automatically. “No, really-I don’t mind. Thank you.” It was-thoughtful, what Heero had done. It wasn’t anything he had expected. “Sit down,” he added, after a minute, as he continued to stand, awkward, just inside the doorway.
“None of the chairs will hold me,” said Heero, finally meeting Duo’s eyes. “And your own rooms don’t change. You’re too human. It-impedes the ability of the castle.”
“Oh,” said Duo. A human presence kept the castle from altering itself? What sort of fucked up spell were they in? No sane-or even insane-sorcerer would set up a spell like that, one that was inimical to humanity-even if they could manage it, which was unlikely. Their own magic would have to have enough of a human presence that it would cancel out the spell… The possible implications of what that made the caster was unnerving. “Well, the bed’s big enough, if I move to one side. You can’t just stand there while I eat, anyways.”
“Are you sure?” half-blurted Heero, looking surprised.
“What?” said Duo, looking at him. His tone was casually amused, but there was real worry in his eyes, he was afraid-what there was between the two of them was so fragile. More than delicate: not just going to shatter at a fingertip poking too hard, but going to crack and crumble away into nothing with even too strong a breath. Had he accidentally said something, done something, that would send Heero shying away again, just when he’d thought that the barrier of touch had been breached (and he liked the contact, maybe even more than he knew, more than he was willing to confess to himself) or had Heero just decided on his own that he didn’t want to-to do what it was that they were doing, when Heero hugged Duo and Duo clung back, and when Heero carried him back up the stairs, and when Heero hugged Duo to his side to keep away the evening cold. Had he been imagining that Heero was as aware of their touch as he was? Had it really been just necessary contact, to him, when he’d supported him after the vision, and then carried him back up to his room?
He couldn’t see any of that in Heero, but he supposed that that didn’t mean much. He’d thought that he’d had the man pinned, but he’d been wrong, repeatedly.
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Heero, voice low, still standing by the door.
“What?” said Duo again, and this time there was no calculation behind the word-it was an honest, automatic question
“You don’t need to, to force yourself,” said Heero, still quiet. “You don’t need to give me anything, because you think you owe me or because of-whatever. You don’t need to take the ‘reason’ for your imprisonment here seriously. It’s mor-It’s enough that we’re friends,” and he hesitated on the final word, as if hesitant to assume even that much of a relationship. “You don’t need to indulge the deluded whims of the spell, and force yourself to be receptive, responsive, to what’s been forced on you.”
Duo was, honestly, at a loss for words.
Well, he did have a few things to say. They were just going to be incredibly embarrassing, if he said them.
Oh well. “No,” he said, “I’m not forcing myself. It’s-I don’t mind. I like-” he paused. “I like getting to know you. It’s been a long time since I’ve had friends,” and he smiled up at Heero. “And I’m not… I like the, the-Goddamnit, I’m not ‘indulging’anything, I’m just doing, I don’t know what! I like touchi-being near you!” Sure enough, he was blushing. Heero looked startled at his outburst and maybe-hopefully?-happy with it.
There was a long pause.
“Just sit down and let me eat,” said Duo at last, voice sour. Thankfully, Heero seemed to be getting to know his moods well enough to not take it personally, because it wasn’t personal. He scooted over in the bed, leaving a space for the larger man to sit down.
Heero didn’t follow Duo’s order to sit immediately, instead handing Duo a plate of food, which he accepted thankfully if not really graciously.
There were a few minutes of silence as Duo ate and Heero sat, awkwardly, on the edge of the bed. If his hand happened to fall close enough to Duo that his own hand sometimes brushed it, neither of the two mentioned it.
Finally, Duo paused in his meal long enough to speak. “…Why don’t you ever eat with me?” he asked, the question bursting out of him with the sort of curiosity that spoke of something that had been kept reined in for quite some time.
Heero turned his head away again, hiding his face, and Duo felt a brief spark of worry.
“I- can’t eat normally anymore,” he said. “My mouth, the shape of my head, won’t allow it. I eat in private.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Duo, voice open and honest.
“No,” said Heero flatly. There was something delicate in his voice, under the hard metal of his refusal. Duo listened.
“Okay,” he said at last, his words only a temporary retreat, although he wasn’t sure if Heero realized that.
…it just didn’t seem fair, to make someone eat five hundred years’ worth of meals alone.
--end chapter 10--
Lovely, Chapter 11
Series: Gundam Wing
Characters/Pairings: Duo, Heero, Wufei, Quatre, Trowa, Duo/Heero
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Slash.
Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast. When someone stumbles into an enchantment hidden deep within a forest, he trades his life for the lives of one of his slaves... 1x2 shounen-ai.
Author's Notes: My eternal thanks to my incredible beta, Lady_Friselle. She is fantastic beyond words!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
FFnet link
Lovely 10
oOoOoOo
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air.
--from “To Earthward,” by Robert Frost
oOoOoOo
Something in the air had changed, Duo thought. It was starting to feel more comfortable, oddly enough, around the castle, even in the huge, echoing vaults of the dining hall, the main one.
He was starting to talk with Heero, talk comfortably with Heero, while they ate dinner. That was the key word-comfortable.
Something had changed, or maybe broken, and he liked the difference. He was starting to feel like he had a home again. And his homes had always been people, instead of places.
oOo
“Hey, Heero! Great to see you,” said Duo. He was always enthusiastic when he greeted someone, but he didn’t always mean it. He did, this time, and he did most of the time, now.
Heero nodded stiffly and his lips curved, just slightly, into something that could almost be a slight smile. His own greetings had warmed considerably, when it came to Duo.
Something had changed.
Heero had accidentally hurt Duo, and Duo had hurt him back, and Heero had apologized, and meant it, and shared his own painful memories to help right the imbalance. And Duo had accepted.
And they had walked side-by-side into the castle, huddled against each other, human body tucked close against inhuman one, heavy claws brushing against delicate, fragile skin and longer legs forced to slow, and both of them nearly afraid and just as much something else.
They hadn’t really touched each other since. It wasn’t noticeable, not all the time, because they’d never touched each other before, either. But they could tell.
When they accidentally brushed against each other, they could tell. And when there was the opportunity for one to reach out, even just to lightly touch a hand to a shoulder to make the other turn or pay attention, they didn’t, but they both recognized the opportunity.
And they talked. They hadn’t, before.
So Duo could mean it when he greeted the other. Heero noticed-he could hear the slight difference, and it was nearly obvious, now that he was getting to know him, and he knew his own greeting was friendly. Maybe something more. He didn’t know, didn’t know if Duo knew, if anyone knew. If there was anything to know.
“It’s good to see you,” Duo continued. “It’s been a few days-excluding dinner, of course, but you knew that, didn’t you? Hey, want to do something today?”
Heero sighed. “It’s raining,” he pointed out, because ‘doing something’ invariably meant being outside. Duo liked to be in outdoors as much as he could, Heero knew by now-a side effect of years of imprisonment. He hadn’t escaped unscathed, even though he’d never been beaten that badly, really.
“No, Heero, it’s not raining,” said Duo, sounding amused and affecting a lecturing sort of tone. “Rain implies things like ‘raindrops’ and that means space between the various little bits of water. …As opposed to this, which is a vertical river. Covering the entirety of the grounds and then some. What it is doing is not ‘raining.’ Pouring, maybe, or sheeting, or flooding…”
Heero made a faint noise of amusement. Bright violet-blue eyes turned to look at him happily.
“But we could goexploring!” he finished. “Inside, at least. I still haven’t seen most of the castle. This is a damn big place you’ve got here, you know.”
Heero looked at his friend-at his friend, at the person his curse, his mistake, had imprisoned, at the person who was here in case he would say ‘yes’ when Heero asked him if he would marry him, at the boy he might someday love and who might someday love him back, and that was startlingly real-feeling, now, more possible seeming than it had been with anyone else, ever before; Duo had stopped flinching when he unexpectedly found Heero around a corner or when he was suddenly looming out at him from what had been empty shadow a minute before; Duo had stopped having even the slightest reaction, or having any carefully managed non-reaction.
Heero looked at his friend warily. He did like spending time with Duo, more than he liked to admit. He had started actively seeking him out, outside of the hour or so they spent eating together every evening. But there was a big difference between enjoying his company and enjoying the incredible amounts of trouble Duo seemed to attract. It was like metal filings to a magnet.
“Awww, don’t be like that,” said Duo, mock-pouting, a slightly wicked glint in his otherwise guileless eyes. “You know I’d get lost and devoured by dust bunnies without someone along to help me.”
Heero sighed, but he knew Duo’s heart was set on doing this, now, and while he might not be devoured by animated dust animals, he was the sort to end up falling in one of the siege wells, or falling through a rotten board and breaking his leg, or probably any number of disasters he couldn’t think of, because nobody would come across them under normal circumstances. Unless they were Duo.
“Fine,” he said, voice slightly testy, but he thought-although he wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t sure what it meant-that Duo could hear his interest (because Duo was, invariably, no matter what else you said of him,interesting) and his lack of sureness and his slight, careful concern.
Duo whooped loudly. “Yes! There’s nothing else to do, and Trowa, Quat and Wufei are being boring-” Heero translated that to mean that they were going over the records the castle had; Quatre loved looking back at the politics-his own family had records just as old and nearly as biased, although in the other direction-and Wufei was happy to show them to him. Trowa stayed around for the chance to give his opinions as to what those decisions must have been to the rank-and-file. “-so I was really hoping you’d be willing to do something. Some things just aren’t as good on your own.”
Heero felt a slight twinge of guilt, and forcefully shook it away. It was ridiculous. He didn’t owe Duo his time, and gave a considerable portion of it to him anyways-with dinner and checking in at least once or twice a day and other things, he spent more time with Duo than he did with anyone else, than he had with anyone else since…
Since before he could remember. He’d never had friends, really, although he’d had a few playmates when he’d been very young.
“Let’s go!” said Duo, bouncing just a little on the balls of his feet, wide smile spread across his face. Heero forced away a half-formed comparison to the sun on a half-cloudy, wind-blown day.
“Where?” said Heero dryly. Duo made a face at him.
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in that you know what I’m doing and I don’t…”
“What we’re doing,” corrected Heero, and that little reminder that he was doing this, too, somehow meant a lot.
oOo
Duo shivered, just slightly. It was cold where they were, in the very deepest depths of the castle, the floor beneath the basements, hewn right into the earth, and he hadn’t worn enough clothes. It had been one of those deceptively balmy days, aboveground, but the earth still had the chill of winter clinging to it-although they were deep enough that it would probably never be truly warm.
He ignored the cold in favor of poking his head into the next room down the hallway. He’d assumed it was going to be just another dusty little storage room filled with bits of potentially useful detritus someone had decided to save in favor of throwing away, but the heavy wooden door was considerably more ornate than any of the others had been; a lot of them hadn’t had doors at all. There was some sort of faded gilt symbol set into the wood.
“Hey, look at this!” he called over his shoulder to Heero, who was a little ways behind him. Fascinated-he’d never been able to resist a mystery-he tried the latch. The door refused to open.
“Let me try,” said Heero’s voice behind him, and he moved aside-he was, pretty clearly, outclassed in terms of sheer physical strength.
The door still refused to open, even with Heero’s full strength behind it-and that was enough that the thing should have broken down, even if the latch still refused to turn.
“Huh,” said Duo, intrigued. There was nothing like something you couldn’t look at to awaken curiosity. “And look… I wonder what this is, on the door.” He brushed at the thick layer of dust and cobwebs that had covered everything down here-including himself and, especially, Heero, whose fur coat only made things worse-and then scrubbed at them harder, slowly revealing the almost-entirely-faded gilt design pressed into the half-rotten wood of the door.
It was a stylized rose, was his first thought: you saw a lot of roses worked into chairs and picture frames and tapestries and stair rails, around the castle, for some reason. His second thought, enough to make him shiver, was that it looked like magic-the little glinting half-metallic particles, forming waves as they radiated away from their source, over- and inter-lapping: the healer’s fierce, hot-burning bath, or what was left before and after an illusionist started or ended his display, the raw material of pattern and design, or the bruise-colored, plague-colored tide that had filled the city and everyone in it, even though nobody had been able to see it-
Heero was tense behind him. Duo looked back at the man standing behind him, flashing him what he hoped was a cheerful grin-he didn’t feel particularly like smiling, or even forcing a smile. It probably hadn’t worked. Heero blinked at him, then tried to smile back-a real smile, not the little twitch of the lips he’d given him when they’d met that morning-and the sharp canines didn’t even phase him anymore. They had, the first time Heero had smiled at Duo: with his face, the expression looked more like a snarl, a threat, than anything else.
And Duo knew that Heero knew that. He strongly suspected, even if he couldn’t prove it, that Heero had tried to keep himself from smiling (not that he was naturally given to it, even at the best of times) around any of them: Duo, Quatre, Trowa, even Wufei. He’d made it a point to encourage smiling, after he’d realized that. And Heero did smile at him now. Not often, but often enough.
“I wonder why this is down here,” said Duo finally. Something, anything, needed to be said. “I mean, this clearly doesn’t fit in with all these other doors. I wonder if there’s a reason?”
“It might have originally fit another room,” said Heero. “One that got a lot of use, and was in plain view, and so it got decorated. And then it got replaced for some reason, and so they fitted it to one of these rooms down here, instead of just wasting it.”
“Maybe,” Duo said, shrugging. He ran his fingertips over the innermost ring of petals imprinted on the door, shivering slightly, the hair on the nape of his neck prickling. He shook his head to push away the feeling, and turned to look at Heero again.
The lord of the castle was looking considerably larger than he usually did, hair standing on end, as oddly disturbed by the door as Duo was, and Duo half-hesitated, then ran a hand briefly down Heero’s arm, smoothing down the thick fur. Heero started and Duo pulled his hand away, quickly, and looked to one side-there was something there between the two of them, but they didn’t… Didn’t act like they actually were dating, even within the odd, forced, yes-we-are-considering-each-other-as-romantic-partners-kinda sort of situation they were in. They didn’t touch each other.
Softly, Heero ran the back of his own hand along Duo’s arm, the one closest to him, mimicking the gesture, knuckles just barely brushing skin, and Duo shivered again, turning to meet Heero’s eyes. They both looked away again, quickly, after their eyes locked for one quick second.
The eerie mood the mystery and the door had created was broken, though, replaced with awkwardness and unsurety. Duo let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and brushed a hand over the gilt inlay again, letting it fall to the handle again, pressing down on it again, uselessly-
He was walking up the dripping-wet and cold-cold enough that he could see his breath-stone passageway behind the door, walking up and up the rough stairs, himself but also not himself, and somehow he could see even though there was nothing and he was walking and pulling the air of the tunnel into himself, breathing it in and out of his lungs, taking it into who he was, and then he was stepping out of the tunnel, breathing that air into the outside atmosphere-it was late evening, dusk slowly gathering-and he was in the garden, in a garden, one he half-recognized, but there was a pond; it was frozen and he was looking into it, walking out onto it and spreading through it.
-The vision hit him with enough force to drive him to his knees, gasping, lungs and muscles burning, not like cold or heat but like acid had been driven through his bones. Heero was hovering over him, not quite daring to touch him, but the worry making his eyes wild, and the sheer strength of it burned the image into Duo’s mind. He reached out with one hand, shaking helplessly with pain and the aftershocks of the vision, and with his deep, needy gasps for air. He needed to touch something real, needed Heero’s support.
For a minute he thought that he wouldn’t touch him again, and he understood that, accepted it. But then Heero was reaching out, laying one huge hand underneath Duo’s arm, supporting it, and pulling himself down, on his knees to match Duo’s collapsed position, not that he would, built the way he was, and then he was pulling him into an embrace, warm and too tight for comfort, almost too tight to bear, and Duo reached one shaky arm, the one that wasn’t being held by him, around him in return, holding on hard, tightly enough to keep the limb from shaking with anything more than the faintest tremors.
After a minute, Heero seemed to remember his strength, remember who and what he was, and he loosened his grip so suddenly, so quickly that Duo almost let go entirely, so that his friend could have the room to push himself away. But Heero didn’t let go, instead shifting his grip to something almost excruciatingly delicate: the faintest hold, barely exerting any pressure at all. Duo was half relieved-his hold had been verging on painful-and half disappointed; he needed the closeness, the reality and immediacy. He pressed himself closer instead, burying his face into Heero’s clothes and the loose spill of his hair, partly to keep himself from needing to look at the person he was clinging to like a child, a distraught preteen girl.
He was relieved when Heero’s arms pressed closer again, no matter how cautious he was still being-it was better than that butterfly-light too-cautious hold he’d had before. He felt his heart slow and the pain that had invaded his limbs fade to fizzing numbness, like they’d fallen asleep, and then back to something normal. He felt tired, more than exhausted, utterly wiped out, by what he’d gone through. Only the last of the adrenaline in his system kept him from dropping off to sleep right there, still clinging to Heero, both of them kneeling on the rough dirt-and-stone floor of the basement they were in, in front of the door that had caused this.
“I’m sorry,” half-whispered Heero at last, voice heartbreakingly sincere and, inexplicably, afraid, as if he thought that Duo would lash out at him again. The words rumbled through Duo, the way he was pressed against him, held cradled to his chest; he shivered at the intimacy of the feeling.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Duo half-whispered back. “Only one of us insisted on going exploring.”
“You are a-a guest,” said Heero, voice wavering and nearly breaking, because Duowasn’t a guest. He was a captive, a prisoner; he’d been torn away from the world and forced into this unreal half-existence, forced to keep company with a monster who was supposed to be courting him. “It’s my duty to keep you safe in my home.”
And he had failed in that duty. He didn’t know what this door was, but something about it unnerved him; he feared it, or what it symbolized, or what it was holding back. Something about it was-was wrong, in the way that he was wrong; inhuman, dangerous, monstrous. A changed, warped reflection of what it should be.
“No,” repeated Duo, stubbornly. “It’s not your fault, Heero. I don’t blame you. If I blame anyone, I blame myself, but you didn’t know this was down here, did you? Whatever it is, it just didn’t like me. You know how powerful magic can get-halfway to having a personality of its own, and belligerent as fuck. If it’s anything, it’s me-I have the worst luck, you know.” Duo was relieved that Heero still couldn’t see his face: he knew his expression wouldn’t be-happy. Duo knew his luck. Heero didn’t, though… And he would have blamed himself, assumed that Duo was just trying to cushion hurt feelings, even if he did know. And he didn’t.
The two were silent for a long, slow moment, the only noises the slight creaks and rustlings Duo and Heero made, as they shifted slightly, trying to find more comfortable positions-nearly impossible with the way they were kneeling wrapped around each other.
After a minute, Duo sighed heavily. “You should be somewhere you can rest,” Heero said before he could say anything.
“Okay,” said Duo, submitting without much of an argument-it was true and some deep-down instinctual part of him knew that Heero needed to protect him like this, give him the little help he could. He tried to make it to his feet and couldn’t, collapsing as he got halfway up. He spat out a curse.
“I hate being so weak and helpless,” he hissed through gritted teeth, glaring at nothing.
“You’re not weak,” said Heero quietly, and with a conviction that surprised Duo out of his frustration, making him turn to look at the other man with surprise.
“What?” he said, on automatic-he’d heard just fine, and it wasn’t like it was a hard sentence to understand.
Heero shrugged, but didn’t contradict his statement, or add any qualifiers. “Let me carry you,” he asked instead, and he sounded almost hopeful.
“Okay,” said Duo again, almost warily.
But it wasn’t embarrassing, or humiliating. He hadn’t been expecting that. He wasn’t some swooning maiden suffering corsets for fashion’s sake, and he didn’t like to be treated like one, but he wasn’t. It was… Surprising.
He felt like Heero’s equal, even when he was being carried by him because he’dcollapsed, despite the ridiculous differences between them when it came to size and strength and physical capability.
And it was-surprisingly nice, to still be touching Heero. To still be holding onto him, and to have him holding on in return.
It had been a long time since he’d really had any physical contact with another being, let alone for this long, or this closely. Never with the connotations this had-never with this situation, any of its permutations: never with a suitor, for lack of a better word; never with someone who’d held him captive, thank any listening gods; never with someone like Heero.
Never with this much-trust. He trusted Heero, at least a little. He didn’t know how much.
oOo
Duo had been asleep for hours when a persistent knocking on his door slowly dragged him back to the waking world.
“Nngh. Wh’s’t?” he mumbled, still exhausted. The vision, the hallucination-whatever it had been-had made him more tired than he had known it was possible to be.
“Heero,” came the answer, and the lord of the castle sounded hesitant, self-conscious, too-aware of what he was doing, whatever it was.
“H’lo, Heero,” Duo yawned. After a minute he added, belatedly, “Uh, you can come in, you know.”
The door was pushed open carefully, and Heero padded silently into the room, looking cautious.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Tired,” said Duo immediately. “But much better.” Some hours of sleep had certainly helped with that. Belatedly, he glanced at the clock-nine in the evening or so. That would explain why he was so hungry; subconsciously, he placed a hand on his empty stomach.
“I’m glad,” said Heero, the rote niceties coming to him automatically, but Duo couldhear the real emotion behind the words.
“…oh!” said Duo suddenly, after a brief second’s pause, realizing why Heero must be here: it was past dinnertime. The curse required that they eat dinner together, every day; apparently illness (or the side effects of mysterious doorways, at least) wasn’t any excuse. “Dinner. Of course! I’m sorry. Uh, if you’ll give me a minute, I can get dressed-” I can probably get dressed, he added, silently, to himself. He’d still been weak as a newly-born kitten when Heero had dropped him off in his bed, and he hadn’t really tried moving since then.
Heero shook his head, expression clouded with something but not anything that Duo could clearly read. “No,” he said, “You should stay in bed. Rest is good for these things.” It was too, Duo knew.
“But what about…?” Duo began. He knew that the castle had given him seven levels of Hell the one time he’d tried to escape his duty, but he didn’t know how it would react to its lord doing the same.
“I brought dinner,” said Heero abruptly, voice rough, looking determinedly to one side. “If you’ll let me stay, it should be enough-” He broke off, then began again. “I don’t want to impose, but the curse…”
“Its fine,” said Duo automatically. “No, really-I don’t mind. Thank you.” It was-thoughtful, what Heero had done. It wasn’t anything he had expected. “Sit down,” he added, after a minute, as he continued to stand, awkward, just inside the doorway.
“None of the chairs will hold me,” said Heero, finally meeting Duo’s eyes. “And your own rooms don’t change. You’re too human. It-impedes the ability of the castle.”
“Oh,” said Duo. A human presence kept the castle from altering itself? What sort of fucked up spell were they in? No sane-or even insane-sorcerer would set up a spell like that, one that was inimical to humanity-even if they could manage it, which was unlikely. Their own magic would have to have enough of a human presence that it would cancel out the spell… The possible implications of what that made the caster was unnerving. “Well, the bed’s big enough, if I move to one side. You can’t just stand there while I eat, anyways.”
“Are you sure?” half-blurted Heero, looking surprised.
“What?” said Duo, looking at him. His tone was casually amused, but there was real worry in his eyes, he was afraid-what there was between the two of them was so fragile. More than delicate: not just going to shatter at a fingertip poking too hard, but going to crack and crumble away into nothing with even too strong a breath. Had he accidentally said something, done something, that would send Heero shying away again, just when he’d thought that the barrier of touch had been breached (and he liked the contact, maybe even more than he knew, more than he was willing to confess to himself) or had Heero just decided on his own that he didn’t want to-to do what it was that they were doing, when Heero hugged Duo and Duo clung back, and when Heero carried him back up the stairs, and when Heero hugged Duo to his side to keep away the evening cold. Had he been imagining that Heero was as aware of their touch as he was? Had it really been just necessary contact, to him, when he’d supported him after the vision, and then carried him back up to his room?
He couldn’t see any of that in Heero, but he supposed that that didn’t mean much. He’d thought that he’d had the man pinned, but he’d been wrong, repeatedly.
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Heero, voice low, still standing by the door.
“What?” said Duo again, and this time there was no calculation behind the word-it was an honest, automatic question
“You don’t need to, to force yourself,” said Heero, still quiet. “You don’t need to give me anything, because you think you owe me or because of-whatever. You don’t need to take the ‘reason’ for your imprisonment here seriously. It’s mor-It’s enough that we’re friends,” and he hesitated on the final word, as if hesitant to assume even that much of a relationship. “You don’t need to indulge the deluded whims of the spell, and force yourself to be receptive, responsive, to what’s been forced on you.”
Duo was, honestly, at a loss for words.
Well, he did have a few things to say. They were just going to be incredibly embarrassing, if he said them.
Oh well. “No,” he said, “I’m not forcing myself. It’s-I don’t mind. I like-” he paused. “I like getting to know you. It’s been a long time since I’ve had friends,” and he smiled up at Heero. “And I’m not… I like the, the-Goddamnit, I’m not ‘indulging’anything, I’m just doing, I don’t know what! I like touchi-being near you!” Sure enough, he was blushing. Heero looked startled at his outburst and maybe-hopefully?-happy with it.
There was a long pause.
“Just sit down and let me eat,” said Duo at last, voice sour. Thankfully, Heero seemed to be getting to know his moods well enough to not take it personally, because it wasn’t personal. He scooted over in the bed, leaving a space for the larger man to sit down.
Heero didn’t follow Duo’s order to sit immediately, instead handing Duo a plate of food, which he accepted thankfully if not really graciously.
There were a few minutes of silence as Duo ate and Heero sat, awkwardly, on the edge of the bed. If his hand happened to fall close enough to Duo that his own hand sometimes brushed it, neither of the two mentioned it.
Finally, Duo paused in his meal long enough to speak. “…Why don’t you ever eat with me?” he asked, the question bursting out of him with the sort of curiosity that spoke of something that had been kept reined in for quite some time.
Heero turned his head away again, hiding his face, and Duo felt a brief spark of worry.
“I- can’t eat normally anymore,” he said. “My mouth, the shape of my head, won’t allow it. I eat in private.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Duo, voice open and honest.
“No,” said Heero flatly. There was something delicate in his voice, under the hard metal of his refusal. Duo listened.
“Okay,” he said at last, his words only a temporary retreat, although he wasn’t sure if Heero realized that.
…it just didn’t seem fair, to make someone eat five hundred years’ worth of meals alone.
--end chapter 10--
Lovely, Chapter 11