Chapter Six

This Heart and a Riot

There is too much blood on the bed sheets. I may not have killed anyone since blowing up Sandrock but I was more than aware that the quantity on the sheets meant that someone had bled out. I didn't want to think of how or why as Trowa packed up whatever personal possessions he had in this room, ready to leave Cairo for wherever he was planning to go to next.

"Trowa."

He ignores me. It is to be expected but I am still surprised by the call that brought me here. A phone call that was not encrypted, that was not on one of his secret channels and came through directly to me. On one of my private numbers but still with no precaution, no attempt at safety on his part. I knew, that despite everything, that there was a chance that my private channels could be intercepted by the Preventer investigation. And I knew despite Duo's sympathy and the difficult position that he and Wufei had been put in that they would do everything in their power to find him. After all, it would take a Gundam pilot to catch a Gundam pilot.

It was the first time that he asked for help like this – not like Paris where I am sure he just wanted comfort, this was when he wanted me to arrive as I did – with money, with bribes for the police officers who had arrested him within the midst of the riots. He hadn't been identified in the overfull cells, the protesters of the Spring Uprisings making him appear as just another angry young man who had been in a violent situation outside the government buildings.

I didn't know why he was in Egypt, if the blood on the sheets was some kind of political hit and I did not want to know the level of coercion and the situation that led to whoever he killed being here – a cheap motel room where I could hear the sound of a loud television through the walls, reporting the escalation of violence.

"Trowa," I repeat.

He has seemingly packed up everything he had here and finally his eyes settle on me. I've not had any contact with him since Paris as somehow, somewhere deep inside, I thought that it was our goodbye and when I left, we'd kissed in his room one more time and I'd said nothing as he slid his hands down my back and then released me. I saw no need to speak. There was something obvious in his body language, in the way his head hung, in the way his lips had moved against mine. I didn't say goodbye. I returned to work and life, able to honestly answer when I saw Duo again that I hadn't heard from him for some time. Sceptical as he always was, he looked at me with wary blue eyes, nodded and put an arm on my shoulder in some show of sympathy or solidarity or something I was not sure of. I think sometimes he felt he took some of the blame for our fucked up relationship with his fifteen year old self's gentle teasing and innuendo. It was never his fault. I'd walked into everything with Trowa with my eyes wide open.

Like now. I knew he would never ask for my help like this unless it was desperate. Never wanted my money, never wanted my help in any way, so damn determined to stand alone. And now he had asked – I had bribed police officials and I had used the money that he so hated to save him. Now I really could be indicted. Not just harbouring a wanted man. Helping him. Assisting him. Aiding in his escape.

"This is it," I say, something that I knew would come eventually.

This is the end and I knew that with a crushing certainty. I wish Paris had been as there was something oddly romantic about those days. There was no violence. There was as near as we ever came to making love and being in love and being us. Now we were standing in a motel room in a city in turmoil, out of the window the sight of smoke visible, someone else's blood on the sheets.

He doesn't speak and I think it is probably appropriate as he steps towards me one final time, though he drops his bag and reaches for his neck, removing those dog tags that had become a fascination to me. They slide into my hand and I am confused. Trowa is not sentimental. He has kept nothing of himself for all these years – all the temporary places that he stays, the rooms have had nothing to indicate his identity – and since he started wearing them, I speculated on what they meant as they had to mean something. Otherwise, they were just something else that didn't mean anything to him, like the clothes he wore, like his name, like the places he left behind, like our relationship beyond sexual gratification and a shared understanding of needs.

"Whose were they?" I ask and I fear that in the close proximity, all that will happen is that he will kiss me and I will capitulate to that desire as I know this is ending and a part of me wants one more time. I know it will happen. Despite the fact he needs to leave and plans to do so swiftly – I will always be his one weakness, his destruction as much as he is mine – as though we will constantly replay a version of our battle in space.

"There was a kid in the merc group in Vietnam in November. They just called him Little One or kid." I open my hand to look at them, the engravings old and scuffed. I don't need any more of the story. I know enough of Trowa's own history. But he continues. So I let him. "He got left behind after a fire fight. I went back for him."

He leaves out what he doesn't want to say. Or what he doesn't need to. I can see the image, though in my mind it is replaced by Trowa as I imagine he was as a child instead of the other nameless boy, dead and left behind. Like he could've been so many times in his life.

I reach for him one last time, my hand against his cheek in a gentle gesture that doesn't suit us, not in a blood stained room. And then I know why he came to me after the ESUN Fiscal Policy Summit and why he was so needy and how the fire of booze never helped. He carries his ghosts around him, collects them from a history of wandering, and I know why he will never stay in one place. He would never just be with me. Never could.

Our kiss is hard, desperate, open-mouthed and I find those dog tags drop to the floorboards, bare and scuffed underneath us as we try to make this last encounter mean something. I want to remember Trowa in so many ways – remember him at fifteen, suspicious and untrusting, remember him aboard Peacemillion, fucking away his confusion with me and as he has been for so many years, my lover, my partner, my equal, my drug, my perfect storm.

I don't resist him. I feel I never have been able to. My hands are in fists in his clothing, we collide into a wall, my back hitting it hard and he nips at my lower lip, in a fit of passion, marking me as his for one last time. His lips slide to my neck, his teeth bite down and then his tongue is there and we have reverted to our pattern of pain and release, Paris forgotten and a part of me aches for that gentleness and a part of me wants him exactly as he is now.

My chest is slammed against the wall until I can brace myself with my arms and I am half dressed as neither of us felt the need for nakedness. I close my eyes tight during his slide into me and shut them tighter on each aggressive thrust of his hips, I feel his breath, his hair, his body, like I will never feel again and I jolt not through the pleasurable sensation rippling through my body, but from the touch of his hand. I open my eyes to see his hand covering mine as it is pressed against the wall, his fingers longer, more callused than mine but connecting us in a way that was far more intimate than our fucking.

It does not take long, too long since we've been together and unusually, since Paris I'd found myself with no one else in my bed. He bites down into my neck as he comes and he slides out, turns me around, realising that I haven't – his aggression and need enough to take me near but not close enough – and he slides to the floor with practised grace. It takes moments of his lips wrapped around my dick for me to find release, my hand brushing at his hair and I feel the brief euphoria before the crushing knowledge of finality.

He stands back up, I whisper his name against his lips and kiss him, taste myself and I want to make the demands I never made of him. I want to say that I need him, that I always have, and that if he wanted it, I'd give up everything for him – the business, the life of respectability, the emptiness of offices and mansions – but he never wanted me to. I wanted to say "I love you" like I've never done, never allowing myself to feel that as otherwise this would hurt more – this final slide of bruised lips, the way our tongue entwine. But I know it will never be. I know what I've done.

The brief haze of pleasure is replaced by the readjustment of clothing and the picking up of his bag. He stops at where the dog tags landed, placing them back into my hand, and he gives me one last searching look.

"Quatre," he says and I feel like I will imprint the way he says my name on my brain. "I forgive you."

My eyes must display my shock as his hand leaves mine – as I hear the noise and I realise he was more aware than I thought, that his impatience, that our fuck against the wall needed to be quick as he knew. Maybe he just expected that one day I would. I don't say sorry as we hear the sound of heavy booted footsteps, at the sound of banging on the door and the word "Preventer" shouted in warning. He doesn't use the door, I suppose he never intended to, as he jumps from the second story window and I am not quick enough to see his landing, though I am able to see him run just before the door opens wide and the expected agents filter through. I step back from the window, hear the "fuck" and "shit" as the attempt to ambush him has failed, knowing that despite an almost inhuman display of acrobatics, this time it wasn't just Duo and Wufei. He would only get so far.

I am not arrested. I am left in the room as the lab technicians search, as they take blood samples, as I clutch tightly onto those dog tags in my hand until I decide to slide them around my neck. I sit on the floor, my back against the wall where only a short time ago he was with me and I touch the bite mark as though it makes everything better. It doesn't. I sit until I hear a familiar voice.

"You had to," Duo says and I nod, stunned maybe, as he gets me to my feet, attempts to move me from the room swiftly.

"They get him?" I ask.

"Ain't heard from 'Fei's team but he ain't got nowhere to run, Quat." He pauses and I feel his hand on my shoulder and I don't want him to touch me so I shrug it off. "It was the right thing, ya know."

I glance back to the room with the blood stained bed and I feel the dog tags around my neck. I don't know if it was the right thing – I never will – but his words ring in my ears.

"I forgive you."

I think he was the one person who knew me as I was, who saw underneath the suits and the wealth, who knew me as a frightened soldier, as a killer, as a man. The one who saw through everything. And he may forgive me, may let me visit him in whatever maximum security prison he is confined in but I fear, I will never forgive myself.