Allegro

Welcome to my school, the Mistake by the Lake. Here there be a fusion with my everyday life, and that of our favorite pilots. You will see action, romance, teenage angst, and the most violent game of musical chairs this side of the Appalachians! So now, let me slap some disclaiming and a warning up, and then head off to class before the vice-principals swoop down and rain detentional doom upon your heads!

Disclaimer: Anything that sounds like I don't own, I don't own.

Warnings (To be read carefully.): AU. High school canon. Shounen-ai and hetero couplings. Self-insertion, but not in a Mary-Sue type role. And a little messing with the time-space continuum. Couplings (Very Important): Primarily 3x4x3. Also, 2x1/2xH, 5xS, 6x9.

            If ever there was scientific proof that all living creatures, human beings included, displayed a sort of herding instinct, one needed to look no further than the halls of Silver Lake Regional High School. Like Pavlov's dog, the tri-town students were trained to move at the sound of a bell, wandering sheeplike through the vomit-green hallways. Quatre struggled against the tide of acne-riddled adolescent bodies, clutching at his tan messenger bag for all it was worth. If he fell now, he'd be trampled to death under the soles of gum-encrusted Nikes and the thick, eight-inch platforms of perfumed girls who wore far too much mascara and hula hoop sized earrings.

            The stage-side door to the Little Theatre was mere yards ahead now, sanctuary from this sea of pot smokers and academic dreamers. If he could just get there, he would be safe from this mob. But, as luck would have it, his shoelace decided now was the best time to come loose, and he stepped on it, falling forward onto his face and the pukey greenish brown of the tiled floor.

            If he'd been one of those beefy football players, there wouldn't have been a problem. But Quatre Raberba Winner, a junior, was five foot five, only weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, and was easily mistaken for a girl. Perfect fodder for the masses as they thundered through the corridor. He couldn't get up, too weighted down by the bookbag that had now wrapped in a stranglehold around his neck. His hands had been stepped on, fingers probably broken beyond use, and so he did what any reasonable person did: hunched up in a ball until a teacher could come and rescue him.

            "Oh dear God, please don't let me die here," he muttered, trying to stand again. Somebody stepped across his back, probably snapping his spinal cord in half. Suddenly a hand shot out of nowhere, and he gladly accepted the proffered appendage as the small teenager was hauled to his feet like a fish on a line.

            "Thank you! You honestly saved my life!" Quatre gasped as his savior nearly dragged him into the alcove by the theater door. He glanced up at this miraculous person…and up…and up. It was a teenage boy, junior, possibly senior age, height of something in the ballpark of six one, six two. He was an olive-skinned Adonis with handsome, angular features and a very Romanesque nose, as well as gorgeous cupid's bow lips. His face was half-obscured by a fall of russet hair that cascaded in one sharp-looking bang. The young man's visible eye was an ivy-green, cool and serene.

            "I have seen the running of the bulls in Pamplona. It was like this," the strange boy replied, his quiet baritone voice olive oil smooth and dark with a thick accent.

Quatre laughed, extending a battered and bruised hand. "I'm Quatre Winner, by the way."

            "Trowa Barton." He kissed Quatre's knuckles gently.

Quatre blushed, biting the inside of his cheek. Saved and kissed by an absolutely gorgeous student? The girls would be jealous. "Are you a transfer student?"

Trowa nodded. "From Firenze."

            "Florence? Florence, Italy? Wow, I'm impressed. You tame wild teenagers and you're from my fantasy vacation destination. And I've only known you for three minutes."

They walked into the theater together, Trowa revealing that the arts supervisor, Richard Tuttle, had placed him into the upper class Choir Two for his musical talents. Quatre was just glad he had somebody he could hang out with. As 'tenor of a thousand jibes,' he was often the target of teases from the bass section, as well as some of his fellow tenors.

            "Quatre, we were wondering when you were going to show. Did you stop in the woods for a joint or something?" his best friend and the cruelest of teasing basses, Duo Maxwell, inquired. His ropelike chestnut braid swung about his neck and shoulders like an anaconda.

            "Nah, stampeded outside Tuttle's office."

Duo nodded sympathetically, though his bright violet eyes glinted with mischief. "Well, your harem's been looking for you. The supers have saved you a place again."

Quatre rolled his eyes, looking over at the wooden blocks that ran across the stage, serving as stairs, chairs, and risers for the forty some-odd teenage girls occupying them. His 'harem,' the lot of girls he'd come to befriend, sat in relatively close distance to one another, and waved at him as his eyes scanned down the rows.

            There were Hilde and Lia, the self-titled Super Sopranos, for their superiority in upper-octave notes. Lia, a rather short junior with pitch-dark, shoulder length hair and doe-brown eyes, had once made the glib remark that she could probably go higher than an E flat if she really tried. Hilde, petite as well, her black hair so inky it was more or less blue, would make her baby blue eyes sparkle with heavenly fire any time she got close to a B flat, just to show off. They knew him from Latin class and were a couple of teases.

            "Quatre, get away from the guys, you know you're a soprano. Come on!"

            Beside them were Relena and Dorothy, two very blonde, very talkative second sopranos. Dorothy was a year older than Relena, and had the habit of looking very intimidating by glaring at you with her blue-gray eyes and her forked eyebrows. Honey-blonde Relena was imbued with a diplomatic air, but chased hot track boys just the same.

            Sally and Nicki tried to distance themselves from these two, but found their efforts fruitless. Somehow the two first altos, one a kindly senior with leonine-gold pigtails, and the other a short junior with chestnut hair to rival Duo's, always ended up near the chattering socialites.

            "Quatre, come over here and let me take a look at you. You look like you got run down by half the football team," Sally called out, digging in a pocket for a roll of bandage tape. She was trying to get to Harvard Med to be a doctor, and constantly carried some sort of medicinal accoutrement with her at all times.

            And there was Lu Noin, the second alto. She was a tall, slender senior girl with short, blue-black hair and a sort of militant attitude. Her father was a corporal in the Army, her two older brothers in the Marines and the Air Force. It was usually Noin's self-appointed duty to protect Quatre from the other girls.

            "Hey Quatre, who're you going to take to homecoming?" Relena called out, chewing idly on one pink-painted nail.

            "I'm not going. You know I hate dances," he retorted, stealing his already-pilfered choir folder back from Hilde.

            "You really don't know what you're missing," Lia observed. "Between you and Nicki…the level of your antisocialism is really starting to get depressing."

            "You use too many big words," Nicki grumbled.

            "No, you're just stupid," Lia corrected, doodling on the back of a rhythm reading paper with the pencil she kept tucked in her choir folder, the eraser worn down to nothing, the point dull.

            "I wish you'd consider it, Quatre," Dorothy sighed, taking a swig of Gatorade from the bottle sitting innocuously by her foot. "I hate having to go with Alex and Mueller every year, they're so puerile."

            "Latin vocabulary!" Lia and Hilde screamed. Dorothy jumped, glaring at them.

            "I hate when you do that!"

Hilde giggled. "Which is why we do it all the more. Hey Duo, don't forget, it's my turn to go to homecoming with you! Heero got to go last year, so…"

Duo made a face. He was engaged in two on-again off-again relationships, one with Hilde, another with the school's computer god Heero Yuy. Everybody had just given up on keeping track of who was Duo's significant other by now and assumed they were a threesome.

            "I was hoping you'd be Quatre's pity date and we'd double," Duo replied from across the room, trying to barter a Hostess™ Zebra Cake off of Nichol.

Quatre sighed in annoyance. "I told you, I'm not going! I don't want to be anybody's pity date!"

Hilde looked offended. "And here I was, trying to be sympathetic and nice to the sad little dateless gay boy. Screw you, Winner."

Sally pouted, reaching over and patting the petite girl's arm. "Well, Wufei refuses to go, so you can be my pity date, Hilde."

            At that moment in time, Miss DePasqua, choir director and the most pathetic excuse for a pianist walked in, carrying a dilapidated cardboard box full of even more dilapidated sheet music.

            "You should all have your folders and be in your seats by now!" she said, dropping the box with a resounding thud. The fifty some-odd juniors and seniors organized themselves into their voice parts and sat, trying to give off the air of innocence that they'd been sitting there for ten minutes rather than ten seconds.

Miss DePasqua, a short, dimply blonde woman with far too much energy, leaned over her music stand podium and rifled with the mess of papers scattered on it.

            "Couple of announcements before we get started. The cast of Once On This Island is selling Book Sox, buy them, we need money. Senior District participants, get your checks in as soon as possible, the deadline is Tuesday. And, I'd like to introduce our new addition to Choir Two, this is Trowa Barton, he's from Italy, and he'll be singing with us for the rest of the year. Please make him feel welcome."

Trowa nodded an acknowledgement, sitting beside Quatre on the border between bass and tenor. Several of the girls had uttered a weak greeting or waved.

            "All right, stand up!"

The students reluctantly got to their feet, going through the various warm-ups almost robotically, the same half dozen scales and syllabic rhythms they'd do every rehearsal. Quatre usually watched the expressions on the girls' faces during these. Noin would purse her lips if they didn't exercise enough in her low register. Nicki and Sally would roll their eyes in a certain way every time the scale would traverse into upper octaves. Dorothy and Relena didn't even warm up, they just chattered. Hilde and Lia would make ridiculous faces whenever Miss DePasqua would approach a high note and then stop before they had the chance to belt it out full-voiced.

            "Your girlfriends are funny, Katore," Trowa murmured while the bubbly blonde teacher played something far too high for the male voice range. Quatre smiled at the pronunciation of his name. Katore…sounded exotic and sensual the way it was said.

            "Funny in a pathetic kind of way," he replied. "Take Noin, for example. She's always trying to be better than Zechs…that's that blonde sitting two seats to your right…and he's her boyfriend. And Sally and Hilde can't control their boyfriends. Dorothy and Relena obsess over men like the world would end if they don't have boyfriends. Nicki doesn't care about guys, she had a boyfriend for a while and then he dumped her for this whiny nymphomaniac. And Lia…well, she's a little crazy, and everyone always picks on her because she's the most eligible bachelorette this side of Julie DelGreco, who's really quite sad, and everyone says Lia's a lesbian since she's always stuck going to dances with other girls. But she assures me she's happily hetero."

            "Ah. My sister Catherine is like that. She takes trips to Napoli and Sicilia every now and then to see if there are any men stupid enough to want to date her."

Quatre chuckled. "Sisters, now there's a subject. I have five older sisters who're always picking on me because I'm the baby of the family."

            Miss DePasqua struck a chord and instructed her pupils to shut up and take out a certain piece of music they were working on. As she began plunking her way through the introduction she informed them that they had less than a month until their fall choral concert, so they'd better damn well pay attention for the next couple of rehearsals if they were ever going to finish their music in time. She was especially concerned about an a cappella piece they were working on, an extremely difficult classical work that was only about halfway learned. Trowa flipped through the book and smiled slightly.

            "What?" Quatre hissed as their teacher worked with the sopranos and altos on their two-part harmony.

            "I know this song. We did it in our madrigal choir at home."

Duo slugged him on the shoulder. "Damn, that's some luck!"

Choir trudged on slowly, the period full of wrong notes and repeating the same six measures over and over again, until the rhythms were almost too perfect. Some days Quatre loved choir, for he was a very music-oriented person. This was one of those other days, when he loathed the tedium and the repetition. He glanced up at one point and saw Lia hunched over her folder, drawing again with her sad little pencil. He wished that Miss DePasqua had been absent, since substitutes were rare to come by and they would've ended up with a free period, then he could've continued his conversation with Trowa. He was dead certain that he was infatuated with the handsome Italian, the first real, solid crush he'd ever had on anyone; the kind of crush that makes one squirm in their seat as illicit fantasies cavort in their head. Finally, after the agony of singing "Yankee Doodle" a minimum of six times, the period was over, and the sixty upperclassmen were free for the last five minutes while they waited for final announcements and last bell.

"God, if I never sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic again, it'll be too soon!" Duo groaned, cracking his knuckles as he tossed his folder in the metal bookcase, standing in a shaded corner of the stage. Quatre sighed, slipping his own black folder alongside Duo's.

"Unfortunately, we have another three weeks of rehearsal until the concert," he pointed out.

"Shut up!"

The girls were standing around, busying themselves with their backpacks and complaining about the homework they had to endure. Trowa stood by the piano, idly sifting through the piles of music that lay scattered about. Quatre shouldered his messenger bag and trudged over, sitting on the bench and tapping several of the worn keys, the imitation ivory cracked from time.

            "So what'd you think of choir?"

Trowa shrugged, glancing over at Quatre. "The teacher…she's strange."

Duo bounced over, throwing an arm around Quatre. "Yeah, well that's what you get here at Saliva Lake! The crappiest school on the South Shore and crazy les-bean chorus teachers!"

            "Les-bean?" Trowa repeated, his visible eyebrow arching.

            "Lesbian," Quatre corrected, jabbing Duo with an elbow. "Get off of me, you have a girlfriend and a boyfriend, you don't need me to cling to as well."

The shrill final bell rang, and the students raced out of the auditorium in a torrent of bodies. Sally and Noin were practically dragging Lia away bodily, the smaller girl protesting.

            "Let go! I'm going, I'm going! I know we have a National Honors Society meeting, you don't have to drag me!"

Hilde and Duo walked off somewhere, probably to skulk about the locker rooms, waiting for Heero, star runner for the cross-country team. Quatre hated the locker rooms, with their noisome stench of unwashed uniforms and sweaty bodies. He waved a hasty farewell to his friends and trudged off to the buses, dubbed the 'loser cruisers' by all who lacked the freedom of their drivers' licenses. Not that it mattered, anyway, as Silver Lake had a strict seniors-only parking limitation.

~^*^~

            Quatre lived in a decently sized house in Plympton, with a fairly mediocre view of Silver Lake, which was really just a glorified reservoir. Plympton was the smallest town of the district, mostly farms, though how anyone could farm anything in such rocky New England soil was beyond him. Most people just kept horses, or llamas. If he had his way, their spacious backyard could've been a camel farm, just for his own personal amusement. There were emus, llamas, and horses in Plympton, why not camels as well? He stepped off the bus and walked the three feet to his mailbox, dug around for the collection of electric bills and Filenes' coupons, and plodded methodically up the driveway, sneaker-shod feet crunching acorns as he went.

            "I'm home!" he called out, dropping the mail on the counter and his bag on the floor of the dining room. A young Siamese cat with eyes almost the same shade of aqua as his own minced into the room, immediately demanding attention.

            "Hello, Sandrock. Looks like you're the only one around to greet me, eh?"

Suddenly something small and brown dive-bombed his head, zipping around the corner. A group of shrieks resounded as five blonde women charged down the hall, brooms and fishpond nets in hand.

            "Did you see it? Which way did it go?" they jabbered at once. Shaken, Quatre pointed to the alcove the foreign object had disappeared to. The five women, his elder sisters, let out battle cries and rushed into the corner, flailing their nets and screaming. Iria, middle sister, uttered a hoarse holler. "Got it!"

The girls ran for the door, sending a tiny brown sparrow into the cool autumn air. Quatre regarded the girls with confusion, staring at his imbecilic relations with their sweatshirt hoods pulled tight over their heads and their weapons held in threatening poses.

            "I don't even want to know what I missed."

Iria shrugged, pulling off her hood. "Madiha took that spider plant in off of the porch. Guess there was a bird living in it."

Madiha, eldest of the Winner sisters, grinned wickedly. "Kali damn near had a heart attack."

            "Well, you would've too if something flew at your head in the middle of Passions! Fricking bird attacked me just as Miguel was about to kiss Kaye!"

Clio chuckled at Kali as she rummaged in the refrigerator for a can of Coke, while Amyra broke open a tin of cookies, which were actually chunks of fried pita bread coated liberally with sugar.

            "So how was school, favorite brother?" Clio asked, taking a long sip of soda.

He shrugged, taking a handful of the crunchy pita cookies for himself. His sisters, all of them college age or slightly older, had made no indication of wishing to leave home any time soon. They worked for their father while they were earning their degrees, and he had no desire to get rid of them any time soon, since they were the ones who maintained the house and cooked. Their mother had died from complications after Quatre's birth, and so they'd all taken it upon themselves to stay nearby, so that they could be there for their baby brother.

            "Fine, I guess. I got trampled, there's a wicked hot Italian student in my choir, the girls tried convincing me I needed to go to homecoming. You know, the usual."

Amyra raised a delicate blonde eyebrow. "Hot Italian student? Do tell."

            "His name's Trowa Barton, and I swear, you'd all die if you saw him. He's gorgeous! Tall, and dark, and he's got these green eyes…" Quatre gushed, waving a piece of pita emphatically.

Madiha frowned. "You know, it's still pretty creepy hearing you spout sonnets about guys."

Iria swatted her absently. "Oh, shut up. Quatre's gay, deal with it. You're just still bitter because you lost the betting pool."

Quatre glared at his sisters, remembering how they'd all placed bets on his sexuality, and then made him take a Cosmopolitan test to determine it. Madiha had been the lone "hetero" vote, though Amyra had originally said "hetero" and changed her mind after one question.

            "So…if he asked you to homecoming, would you go?" Kali asked, snatching a pita from Clio's fingers and popping it into her mouth before her sister could retrieve it.

Quatre shrugged. "Dunno. Maybe. I'm going up to do my homework, and maybe take a nap."

            "You feeling all right, Quatre? You've been napping an awful lot lately," Clio pointed out.

            "I don't have mono, if that's what you're asking."

The five young women giggled. "Kissing disease!"

Quatre rolled his eyes, retrieving his necessary books and binders. "Honestly, you guys are worse than the girls my age sometimes."

            "We know!"

~^*^~

And thus ends the first chapter. All names, places, and most events are real, true to life stuff completely one hundred percent not fudged. For now. Things may get fudgy as we progress, considering this is a story about a homosexual teenage Gundam pilot, where the author is a heterosexual teenage girl who can't even drive a car.

Next Chapter: Quatre learns that Latin Club is a very dangerous thing indeed.