Adult-FanFiction.org : Gundam, Beyblade, DBZ, FMA

A Stagnation of Love (rewrite)	By : shinigamiinochi Category: Gundam Wing/AC > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 2207 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing AC or the characters from it. I am making no money from this story

Chapter List
- 21
- 22
- 23
A Stagnation of Love

Chapter 5

Part 2
My life is a bit like a hurricane. Every time I end up in the eye, that moment when everything is calm and peaceful and I think that everything is going to be ok, I feel this sense of anxiety and foreboding, because I know that I'll pass out of that eye eventually and all the shit, all of the bad luck I've had, everything that I'm scared of, will come back. When I got Pepper back from Mrs. Liddle without any fuss, I was relieved, but I also felt afraid because I knew that something good like that couldn't happen without something bad on the horizon.

Most of the time the bad things come as a total shock to me. Quatre's suicide, my Mother's confession that I was almost aborted, meeting Relena, all of those things had come out of the blue for me and I had been completely unprepared for them. But sometimes, I get this feeling in my gut like a low electrical charge, this tense, anxious feeling that's like the feeling I get sometimes when I come home and just know that my father is in a bad mood, like I'm waiting for the blow to come before even seeing him.

I felt that way from the moment I came home with Pepper to the end of the next school day, a feeling like an anvil was about to drop on me and I was frantic to find where it was coming from so I could dive out of the way. When I walked home that Thursday and saw my father's car in the driveway when he should have still been at work, I felt my heart drop into my stomach. There was this little voice in the back of my head screaming at me to not go into that house, to just turn around and walk anywhere else, that something was very wrong. And like the idiot that I am, I ignored it.

I think it was that moment that I first realized that having a pet was going to end up being both a blessing and curse, that although I cherished Pepper's company, the responsibility of taking care of her was going to bite me in the ass as much as it was going to save me from my loneliness. Before she had come into my life, if I had come home to that feeling and seeing that my father was home, especially after he had thrown that bottle at my head the last time he had been sent home drunk from work, I probably would have heeded that little voice and gone to the beach or the library. But no, I walked into the house, not because I wasn't afraid of the kind of mood my father was in, but because I wanted to check on my cat.

"What?" I heard my mother shriek just as my hand closed on the door handle.

I froze, debating going inside. It was bad enough that my father had obviously been sent home or been given the day off, but if my mother had just come home from one of her shifts, she was going to whip his bad mood up into a frenzy. Despite all of my common sense, I opened the door. I can't even say that I was curious about what was going on. I had stopped being curious about stuff like that when I was a kid. But if my parents were fighting, I might be able to just sneak past them and up to my room. Or maybe I was just crazy.

"What the fuck do you mean that you lost your job?!" my mom was screaming as I closed the door and I winced at the sheer volume of her voice.

The entire neighborhood was going to hear them at this rate, and that was something I didn't want my father to figure out. He hated being embarrassed.

"You useless bastard! After all the chances they gave you! All you had to do was show up sober for once and you couldn't even do that!"

They were in the kitchen, the two of them squaring off like a pissed off mongoose and a cobra. No blows had been thrown yet, but their faces were both red and furious as they glared each other down.

"Shut up, you miserable cow!" my father snarled at her, "What the shit do you know?! You're so high and mighty, thinking you're better than me! At least I had a real job! I'm not some drunk, sorry excuse for a waitress! The only reason why you bring home any money at all is your boss likes how your tits look in your uniform, and you have the gall to lecture me about how I perform my job?!"

My mother's face twisted with sheer rage at my father's words and she shoved him. I flinched when I saw her do it, knowing exactly what was going to happen before it did.

"I never got fired from my jobs for showing up drunk twice in one week!" she sneered at him, "Big, bad detective you are! I bet you're just as useless at the station as you are here! How the hell are we supposed to pay our bills now, Nathan?! Did you even think of that when you were sucking down another beer this morning?! No, of course not! How does it feel that even your sixteen year old son is more responsible than you?! You're so pathetic, just like your good for nothing father and that swine you call a friend-"

His hand striking her face made this incredibly loud cracking sound, almost like a gunshot. My mother's head flew back and almost hit the wall, a few drops of blood from her split lip splattering on the white, kitchen wall. He didn't even let her recover from it as he slammed his fist into her gut. My mother gave out this strangled sound that was a mix of a scream of pain and a gasp and crumpled to her knees on the floor. He kicked her, sending her crashing into the legs of the table.

His face was contorted and monstrous as he drew his boot clad foot back to kick her again, this time in the back. I ran into the kitchen to do... something. I remember thinking that he was going to kill her and nothing in the world was going to stop it. I had never seen the kind of rage in him that I saw that day, all of his frustration and anger at losing his job focused on my mother. Before I could reach them, he was dragging her up by her hair and punching her in the face, but I managed to grab his arm before he landed a second blow.

"Stop it!" I screamed at him, "Get off of her!"

He let go of her and turned on me in an instant like a rabid dog.

"Don't you fucking touch me, damned brat!" he snarled and punched me in the throat.

I had to let go of him as I suddenly found myself gagging and gasping for air. I could feel my throat spasming, my windpipe not knowing what to do with the sudden injury. It was only for a few seconds, but I panicked as I was unable to breathe and even when I did, every gasp of air was stinging pain. The first, small bit that I managed to suck in had me choking and coughing out blood. Before I could remember what was happening, I felt my father grab the back of my neck and hold me still like I was a damned animal. The next thing I felt was the full force of his boot stomping on the back of my right leg.

The pain was so horrible that I didn't even register that I was on the ground until later, when I woke up on the cold, kitchen floor. I think I might have screamed if I had had the air for it. To this day, I still don't know if it was the injury to my leg that had caused me to black out or if I had hit my head as I had fallen, only that one moment I had felt this incredible pain in the back of my leg and the next, I was laying on my side, my leg and throat throbbing in tandem with each other, and I staring dumbly underneath the kitchen cabinets.

I remember thinking, in a kind of pained shock, that it was awfully dirty under there and the next time that I vacuumed, I should move the cabinets to clean up all the dust and grime I had seen there. I didn't feel confused at all to find myself in the kitchen, which meant that I didn't have a concussion at least. The pain that I was feeling was a pretty good reminder of why I was laying there. What amazed me was that I didn't feel much worse than I had when I had blacked out with the exception of some fresh bruises on my arms and back. I guess my father had given up on me when he had realized that I was down for the count. He just hadn't enjoyed beating on someone who's unconscious, I suppose.

It took me awhile before I found the strength to roll over onto my back. Between my bad leg and how much my back ached, it hurt like hell, but there was nothing wrong with my left leg. I had no doubt that, given a little while longer, I would be able to crawl to my feet. Hopefully. I glanced next to me, under the table, half expecting to see my mother laying there, but there was nothing except for a small streak of blood. I wasn't even sure whose blood it was at that point. I could still taste the stuff in my mouth, thick and coppery. I hate that taste. I wondered if Mom was alive, if my father had come to his senses and taken her to the hospital.

Where I was laying, I could see out of one of the kitchen windows enough to know that it was dark out. I must have been knocked out for a few hours. I had probably missed at least my first work shift. I felt a momentary panic at that, remembering why I was on the floor in agony. My father had lost his job. My fears about his drinking getting him fired had come true. My mother was right, what the hell were we going to do about our bills now? Until my father found another job, or got his old one back, we would have to rely on my mother and myself to live on. And there I was, laying on the floor, missing out on making some money because my father had attacked me.

Not that it would make any difference, I quickly realized. I was in no shape to work that night at all, at any of my shifts. I didn't even know if I could stand, let alone wait tables, and the thought of working at my factory job just made me pale. One thing at a time, I told myself. First I needed to get up off the floor, then I could worry about my mother and our bills and my jobs, but not until I figured out how much my father had hurt me.

I took a deep breath to prepare myself for the inevitable climb to my feet. Big mistake. That one intake of breath reminded me of my wounded throat as pain shot through it and I coughed violently, spiting blood out of my mouth. After struggling to breath normally again for a few minutes, I took extra care to not take anything more than small, shallow breaths.

My journey to get vertical again was a slow, arduous one. That wasn't the first time that I had found myself in that sort of situation, although it was usually broken ribs that made it hard for me to get up after a beating. I was just glad that it had happened in the kitchen instead of in my room. There were more things in there to help me. I didn't even need to move to grab a chair and use it as leverage to sit up. I was extremely careful not to move my right leg, just using my upper body, so it didn't hurt too much. Getting to my feet minutes later was another story.

My first, jarring steps had me almost crumbling to the floor again. Quick thinking alone made me make another grab for the chair and I ended up sitting on it instead of falling. My right leg trembled at my efforts and my calf where my father had stepped on me throbbed like nothing else. But it definitely wasn't broken, it just hurt too much for me to try to move it. I lifted up my pant leg and winced at the sight of the injury. The entire back of my leg from almost my ankle to the back of my knee was dark, bloody red and black. It was pretty badly swollen, too.

I rubbed tiredly at my forehead, the thought of trying to walk upstairs daunting and exhausting.

"Fuck this," I muttered and stood up, putting as much weight on my left leg as I possibly could.

I hissed as pain coursed through my right leg, groaning with it, but I refused to let it drag me under a second time. I took a tentative step forward, towards the phone, and somehow managed a shuffling, heavy limp before my right leg caved and I had to grab the counter to keep upright. This was really going to suck. It was my concern for my mother and nothing else that got me to that damned phone when my entire body was screaming at me to just let it fall and stay there until the pain went away.

I shuffled along the edge of the counter, not daring to let go of it, until I was close enough to the phone to grab it and dialed the number for the nearest hospital. I navigated through their directory with practiced ease until a female nurse answered the line with "Emergency services, how may I direct your call?"

"Hi," I greeted and internally winced at how rough my voice sounded, "Do you a patient named Helen Maxwell there? She would have been recently admitted today. This is her son."

"Hold one moment," she said.

I waited patiently for her to check their records, worrying that she had gone off on her own, was at a different hospital, or who even knew what. I had this image of my father going off to bury the body and pushed it out of my head. There was no way he would have killed her. No way. I mean, sure, I worried about that whenever he got that angry, and he had certainly beaten both of us bloody before, but no matter my fears, I just couldn't admit to myself that he would go that far.

"Yes, a Helen Maxwell was admitted here two hours ago. She's in surgery right now, but I see here that your father admitted her. Did you want to speak to him?" she asked me.

"N-no," I stammered, "I just wanted to make sure that they made it there ok. Thanks," I quickly hung up the phone before she could ask me anything else.

There, I told myself, he did take her to get medical help. Everything would be fine. The worst of my fears assuaged, I had to tackle my next biggest problem. Myself. I couldn't just stand there in the kitchen all night, so I decided to be daring and let go of the counter. My right leg wobbled a bit, but I was getting used to that and the pain as well and managed a slow, but steady limp up the stairs, using my left leg and the railing to get me there. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I didn't fall down those steps and break my neck.

Pepper poked her head out of her hole in the wall as I came in and closed the door behind me. She meowed in greeting and trotted over to me, rubbing against my legs. Even though the pain was getting to be unbearable again, I scooped her up and hugged her to my chest.

"Hey, sweetie," I said tiredly, "Sucky day, huh?"

She myewed like she was agreeing with me and for some bizarre reason, it actually did make me feel a little bit better. My leg was starting to feel stiff, but I limped around the room, checking her litter box, food, and water bowls to make sure she wouldn't need anything before I gave up what little forward momentum that I had. I didn't so much as lay down on my mattress at that point as I slowly and carefully fell down on it. Pepper sat on my chest and batted at my bangs, wanting me to play with her.

"Sorry," I croaked through my abused throat, putting a hand on her and petting her soft fur as I closed my eyes, "In the morning, I promise."

Then I was gone again. It's probably sad that the most sleep I've gotten since Quatre died have been in moments when my body is in too much pain to want to be conscious. I slept in spurts that night, constantly waking up in pain from turning in my sleep for only a few minutes before slipping back under again. It was three AM by the time that I actually woke up long enough to realize that I should probably not keep drifting like that. While my body wanted the rest, I needed to take care of whatever injuries I had that I had neglected the day before.

Besides my leg, I wasn't that bad off, not like my mother was. My throat was killing me and I could still taste blood every time I tried to breathe, but my ribs didn't hurt and nothing was broken. Still, by three in the morning, my right leg was as stiff as a plank of wood. I didn't feel the searing, horrid pain of the day before, but it ached and throbbed unpleasantly, and when I finally stumbled out of bed, my limp was heavy and pronounced. The only real consolation I had was that I knew I was going to have no trouble being excused from gym that day. If I could even manage to get to school.

I struggled to put fresh food and water in Pepper's bowls and then staggered downstairs. My father was sprawled out in his bed without my mother. I didn't feel worried that she was still in the hospital (he had kicked her pretty hard after all), I felt relieved. As long as she was there, he couldn't hit her again. She was a hell of a lot safer than I was.

The kitchen was an absolute mess. There were plates with half eaten food on the counter and cans of beer on the table. It looked like he had helped himself to some of my mother's vodka as well. Feeling frustrated and depressed, I chucked the beer cans into the garbage and when I picked one up that was only half empty, I had the strong urge to dump it onto his sleeping face. I hoped that he would drown in it. Instead, I poured it out into the sink and chucked it into the garbage barrel with the rest of it.

I spent the next hour slowly cleaning the kitchen, as much as my leg would allow. I cleaned off the dishes, put what food could be salvaged into the refrigerator and angrily threw out what had gone bad from sitting out all night. I felt like screaming at him that unless he had plans of finding a job, and fast, he couldn't go wasting food like that.

For the hundredth time since I had come home the previous day, I wondered how we were going to get by now. Just how much could we stretch my and my mother's paychecks? Should I get a fourth job? I didn't have the time for that, unless I could find something that paid better than one of my other jobs. Not bloody likely. There just weren't enough hours in the day anymore. I was already stretching myself thin between trying to take care of Pepper and homework. And it still wasn't enough.

I supposed that I could pick up another job if I dropped out of school. Would my father make me do that? Was that what I wanted? I laughed bitterly in the quiet kitchen, my voice sounding strange. What difference did it make, I wondered. It wasn't like I was doing shit all with my education. I wasn't going to amount to anything. I might as well just give up like my father have. Drop out, get a shitty job, work myself into alcoholism. Wasn't like I had ever had a chance at a real future.

'Don't you dare, Duo!' Quatre's voice rang in my head.

That was right, I thought in exhaustion, he would never forgive me if I did that. And wasn't it stupid that I felt relief then, having an excuse not to give up on school? Wasn't it stupid that I actually wanted to keep going, even though there was no point? Even though it might actually be nice, not to have to deal with my classmates anymore?

I stumbled to the fridge, grabbed an ice pack out of the freezer, and stumbled into one of the kitchen chairs. I propped my right leg up on one of them, rolled up the leg of my pajama pants, and rested my wounded calf on the ice. I hissed at the burning sensation for a second, before that cold started to seep into my muscles and I felt some of the pain ease off into numbness. My leg was swollen even more than the day before.

I was going to have to take the bus to school, I realized with regret. I hated to spend money on something like that, but there was just no way I was going to manage to get all the way from my house to the school. I dropped my head to the table and groaned in frustration. That was my life at that moment. Frustrating. Painful. I wanted to give in to tears. I wanted to scream with all of my worries and anxieties. I wanted to punch my father in the face. I wanted to run away, like Quatre had planned on doing all those years ago.

I truly regretted it then, more than I ever had since he had first mentioned it to me. I should have gone with him. I shouldn't have chickened out. I should have told him yes and run away from it all. If I had, would he still be alive? Would we have managed to do the impossible and disappear from our families and survive together in some strange place, just the two of us? It was such a wonderful dream. I wanted to imagine it, to fall into that fantasy and never come back out of it, but I knew that if I indulged in it for even a second, it would make the life that I'm living now all the more grey and desolate, all the more terrible.

I sat there with my forehead pressed to the cool wood of our kitchen table and bit my tongue to keep the tears from coming. I felt so worthless then, and not just me. The world. My life. Existence. It all felt so meaningless when I compared it to what a struggle every day was. I didn't want to be alive. I didn't want to die, either. I didn't want anything at all. I was just... stuck in this stagnant place where nothing at all mattered to me.

Things had always been bad, but now with our financial future so uncertain, I felt like I was on that mound at the beach, standing at the end and staring down into the ocean. Only it wasn't just the ocean anymore, it was a black abyss, waiting to swallow me whole and sink me down into a darkness filled with monsters with sharp teeth and healthy appetites. Or maybe that came after. Maybe I'm confusing that day with that Sunday, the day that I saw my father for who he really is. (violently scratched out)

Too soon. I'm ahead of myself and I don't want to be. That abyss was waiting for me, though, always waiting, even though I denied it for so long. Too long, like denying my foot was caught in a bear trap until I saw the hunter's gun aimed for me. But that came later.

I wallowed in my misery for awhile before getting up off the chair, putting the ice pack back into the freezer, and limping to the bathroom. I only gave myself a brief glance in the mirror before getting into the shower. There was a dark bruise on the side of my cheek and my throat was a lovely shade of black. I would have to come up with one of my many lies, if anyone actually asked about it. I doubted that anyone would, though.

The cold shower was, for once, heavenly. It served to wake me out of my depressed, groggy, and pain induced stupor. I gulped down some of the icy water and it tasted equally wonderful and terrible as it slid down my injured throat. My father was still sleeping when I left the shower, so I rushed (well, in a hobbling way) back upstairs to get dressed and ready for school, then limped back down for a small breakfast of cereal and made my lunch. I even had the mind to swallow some pain pills with my food.

Taking the bus ended up being a good choice, despite the money that it had cost me. I had to walk down two streets and a couple of blocks to get to the bus stop and by that time, my leg felt hot and swollen like a football and my other leg and hip was starting to ache from the way that I was limping. But the bus ride served to ease the pain a little and the school day seemed just a bit less like a nightmare.

Now that I was at school, I felt incredibly vulnerable. Ever since Zechs had cornered me in the locker room, I had been severely careful in making sure that it would never happen again. I had managed not to so much as cross paths with the asshole since then, though I was sure he was eager for the chance to beat me up after escaping him. Just like with my father, there were only two things that could ever save me from getting hurt or threatened by him again: stealth, which I had succeeded at pretty well since the incident, and speed.

It was only my speed and agility that had seen me through with my hair and everything else in tact. Now I was a mess, limping and with a damaged wind pipe. I wasn't struggling to breathe anymore, but I could still feel that pain and the threat that if I took too deep a breath, my throat might close up again. If Zechs cornered me, I was shit out of luck.

But for the most part, I was left alone that day, free to limp from class to class. I suppose if some normal, well adjusted person ever reads this, they would ask why, at the very least, a teacher didn't ask me about my limp, why, if I came to school with new bruises and injuries, my parents were never called in for a conference or social services were never called.

There are a lot of reasons, I guess. For one, I've only ever witnessed social services being called on one of my classmates once. Sasha Williams, in the 8th grade. She had been a quiet, mousy girl who, like me, hadn't had any friends and came to school bruised if she showed up at all. She could have been pretty, if her nose hadn't been broken so many times. She had lived on my side of town, further South. The rumor was that her mother was a drug addict, some said a prostitute or a stripper.

What was clear was that someone, either her mother or her mother's boyfriend, was beating the shit out of her every day and unlike my father, her abuser had a thing for hitting her face, so it was a bit more noticeable than my father's penchant for going for places that were less obvious, like my stomach or ribs. Her various teachers had called social services a few times, when she came to school with missing teeth or a black eye, but nothing came of it until her mother's boyfriend knocked her up. Services just showed up at school one day and took her away and no one saw her at school or in town anymore.

There was a lot of speculation of what had happened to her, that she had been put into foster care, that her mother had beaten her to death, or even that she had run away. I thought about it once (just the once), calling Social Services and telling on my father. Why didn't I? Well, for one, the same reason my father has never gotten in trouble for it before: his job.

Losing his position on the force hadn't made my father any less of a cop, either. He was still close with the other town cops and people still feared or respected him enough to not want to cause trouble. He still knew quite a few dirty secrets, and he still knew people who would have his back. At least, that was my theory. Who was going to believe a loser like me that my father, who used to be in law enforcement, was beating me? Who the hell would care?

What would happen, I had asked myself, if I did call SS and they did believe me? I would just be another Sasha. My father would go to jail and I would disappear, maybe get shoved into a foster family or one of those government run shelters. I didn't want that. I might hate what my father did, but I loved him and I didn't want to get him into trouble. I definitely didn't want to go to a shelter, all because I couldn't keep a secret. And my classmates and my teachers weren't the ones getting beaten, so why would they want to stick their necks out anyway?

So not only did no one try to find out if I was getting knocked around at home, I encouraged it and went out of my way to make sure no one asked those questions, and if they did, I always had the right answers. I used my reputation as a delinquent and a bullying victim for me. If I came to school beat up, my teachers just assumed that it was because of Zechs or I had picked a fight with someone. If anyone had an idea that it was my father doing it, they turned a blind eye to it.

That's exactly what happened when I limped to my Chemistry class that day, people ignored my obvious injury, or they snickered about how Zechs must have 'given it to him good'. I let them. I was in too much pain to care what their theories were. Chemistry was only my second class of the day, but by the time I got there, my leg was already throbbing unpleasantly.

As I hobbled into the classroom, I made up my mind that I was going to spend my lunch period getting a note from the nurse to excuse me from gym and then just go the hell home. I felt a twinge of depression then as I thought about playing with my kitten and remembered that my father was now unemployed. He could only be in two places by the end of my school day; looking for another job or getting drunk. Guess which one I was betting money on?

I felt bitterness towards him for more than just taking away what little financial security we had had. I had liked going home after school before I had to go to my first work shift because I knew that I would be alone. I didn't even have the surety of that anymore. I would have to go to the library from then on and not see Pepper until I got home and I hated that. It wouldn't be permanent, I told myself. Just until he stopped being so violent or until he found a job, then things would go back somewhat to normal.

I didn't even know what I was going to do about work. I couldn't afford to miss another day, but my leg could barely handle an hour of school, let alone what I would need for it to do through three shifts. Maybe I could just tie an ice pack to it, take as much painkillers as humanely possible, and hope for the best. I sunk into my seat with a heavy sigh, wincing as the metal chair dug into my abused leg muscles. I bit back a groan when I saw our teacher standing at the front of the room, a packet of paper in his hand.

I hate Chemistry class. Our teacher, Mr. Genero, isn't so bad compared to some of my other teachers. He neither hates nor likes me and is pretty ambivalent about all of his students and doesn't seem to have much passion for teaching at all. He just acted like his students, impatiently waiting for the bell to ring so he could get on with his life. That meant that I never got in trouble in his class for being late or Relena destroying my homework, but it also meant that she pretty much had free reign to mess with me without getting scolded by a teacher.

Chemistry itself is not a great subject for me. I did a lot better in my other science classes, especially biology and earth science. A lot of the kids in my class love Chemistry because you get to mix things and do cool experiments that make things explode or change colors and it sure beats listening to a lecture. But to me, Chemistry is just another math class. Worse, it's a math class with experiments and group projects, which means I have to be paired up with someone who never wants to be paired up with me.

To make things even worse, the work stations are these large, high tables, big enough for four people to sit at, but you have to sit on tall stools instead of chairs. Just the thought of climbing up on one of them made me wish I had just stayed home that morning. I listened with half an ear as Mr. Genero prattled on about the kind of experiment we were going to be doing as Relena, who had been crafty enough to sit behind me on the first day of school, pelted what felt like paper balls at the back of my head. Annoying as hell, but not harmful, at least. She was just warming up. I was only interested in who I was going to be paired with.

'Not Relena, not Relena, please, anyone but her,' I pleaded silently.

I haven't had the misfortune of being paired up with her yet, but Mr. Genero is always changing up the criteria of who our partners will be, so it's only a matter of time before that happens.

"Today you will be pairing up by your class ID," our teacher informed us with the same bored tone he seemed to always talk with, "The pairs are as follows: Abbot and Clemens, Darlian and Barns..."

I rubbed tired at my face as I waited for him to get to my name. Then, like a ray of doom, it came to me. School ID's are assigned based on the date when the ID was issued. The majority of my classmates got theirs when they entered either Kindergarten or the first grade, while I didn't get my ID until the fourth grade, so I had a much later number.

Nausten doesn't get a lot of new families moving here, so I've been stuck with pretty much the same kids since my first day of school, which meant that, in my grade, I had had the last ID number for awhile. Before Heero moved here, there had only been one other person in our grade whose family had moved here in the last couple of years, Becca Jackson, but she had transferred to a different science class a month ago. That left just one other person in my class that had an ID number after mine...

"Yuy and Maxwell," Genero announced, confirming my suspicions.

'Oh fuck no,' I almost groaned out loud.

Getting paired up with him was nearly as bad as Relena. I definitely should have stayed home. Genero paused in his name calling, looking behind me.

"What is it, Yuy?" he asked, his tone turning from boredom to irritation at being interrupted.

I looked behind me. Heero was sitting across from Relena with his hand raised, his blue eyes stony with frustration.

"Can I get a different partner?" he said, almost in a demand.

I heard someone in the class snicker and someone else whisper something, probably that they pitied him or how understandable it was that he wouldn't want to be paired up with me. I felt the sting of that for a second. I wanted to point out that I sure as hell didn't want to be paired up with him, either.

"No, you may not," Genero snapped irritably, "Grow up, Yuy. I think you can suffer working with someone you don't like for all of forty-five minutes."

Heero flushed darkly with embarrassment and put his hand down. Relena looked like she wanted to claw the teacher's eyes out for daring to call out her boyfriend and immediately transferred all the hate in her gaze at me, like it was my fault somehow. I had the childish urge to sneer at her. Pissing her off was never a good idea, and with the painkillers that I had taken that morning starting to wear off already, I just wasn't in the mood to play her games, even for the joy of seeing her so enraged over something so tiny. I turned back around in my seat and accepted the packet of papers Mr. Genero handed me without a single complaint. Just get the experiment done, I told myself, it's just one class, then I'll get a different partner for the next one.

"Careful not to sit too close to it," Relena advised Heero in fake concern as he got out of his seat, "The faggot might rub off on you."

He looked uncomfortable for a moment before laughing a little at her bad joke.

"No chance of that," he promised her with a smirk and reached out to touch her hand.

It was such a small move, something that I had seen countless of other couples in our school do, but it made her blush a little. I wanted to gag. But then I just thought about that look of discomfort that he had had. What was that about? Was it the thought of having to sit near me, the thought of faggots at all, or did he just not like that word?

I watched Heero rush to beat me to the supplies that we were assigned, like he didn't even want me to touch them, with a deep scowl on his face. That expression just made him look a lot older and it didn't suit him at all. By the time I managed to get out of my seat and stagger towards one of the tables, Heero had already gotten there and was sitting in one of the stools, setting things up. When he noticed that I was limping, I was sure that he would mess with me somehow, maybe tip the stool that I was heading for over or trip me or make some remark about how I had gotten hurt. Relena and Zechs would have gleefully insinuated that I was limping from getting gang fucked or something gross like that. But he didn't. He didn't even snicker at me as I struggled to get up onto the stool, almost slipping off of it when my leg decided that it had had as much abuse as it could stand for the day and buckled. He almost looked concerned to see me limping. I was positive that I was just seeing things until he said, "Are you alright?"

I gaped at him in total shock, wondering if I had just lost my mind, if I was hallucinating all of it, because there was just no way that Heero Yuy had asked me if I was ok. If he had, it had to be some kind of trick. But with him only a couple of feet away from me, there was no way I could mistake that worried look on his face. If he really was trying to trick me, and that was what it had to be, I couldn't tell what he was up to.

I quickly looked away from him. I couldn't take that expression, that look like he gave a shit, like it mattered to him that I was limping and hurt. It was painful, more painful than my leg injury was. 'Are you alright'. No one had asked me that since Quatre had decided to abandon me forever. No one had even looked at me like that since my father had held me as I had cried at our kitchen table. Not even Trowa. I couldn't handle Yuy of all people looking at me like that, even if it was a trick. It was worse than a beating, worse than any slur that Relena could hurl at me. I hated him so thoroughly for it. Who the hell was he to ask me something like that? He didn't even know me! He didn't fucking care, so why couldn't he just keep his mouth shut about it?

"I'm fine," I lied coldly, "Let's just hurry up and finish this and get out of each other's way, alright?"

In an instant, that concerned gaze melted away into a stony, superior glare that I was much more used to seeing from him.

"Fine with me," he said flatly, "I'll handle the equipment, you take the notes and make the chart. Your handwriting is neater than mine is."

Just like that, he disarmed me once again. How did he keep doing that, surprising me like that? I blinked in confusion at him, trying to remember if he had ever had any occasion to see my handwriting before, but I couldn't come up with any. That was the first time we had been paired up in any class, so how the hell did he know what my handwriting looked like? I just grunted at him in agreement. I didn't care what part of the experiment he wanted to do, so long as it got us far away from each other as soon as possible.

Although I'm loath to admit it, we made a decent team. In actuality, working with Heero was easier than working with most of my other Chemistry partners. He didn't make snide remarks or take my work from me or outright refuse to do any work. We didn't speak to each other, which was just fine by me, we just worked in silence, him performing the experiment and me filling out each result and statistics in a chart that I had made freehand on the back of one of the work sheets.

He had probably just been eager to get away from me as well, enough to cooperate with me, but it was better than having to struggle through one stupid assignment. Things were running smoothly until my leg started to cramp, and stupid me, too involved in charting our progress, I forgot about my injury. I unconsciously shifted my leg to stretch out the cramp and dropped my pencil as a tremor of agony shot up my leg. Before I could regain the sense to catch it, my pencil bounced off the edge of the table and fell to the floor.

"Oh, fuck," I swore as I watched it escape me.

That was my last pencil and I seriously doubted that Heero would lend me one if I asked, so I would have to get up and off the stool to retrieve it. Just by feeling the pain in my leg, I wasn't so sure I was going to manage that without causing some kind of scene, or being unable to get back onto the stool.

I cursed my clumsiness over and over, bracing myself for the slide off of the stool when Heero beat me to it. I watched with that stupid, wide eyed expression of shock that I have that I'm sure makes me look like a stupid owl as he got off of his own stool, knelt down, and grabbed my pencil. I retained my shock as he sat back down and placed the pencil back in front of me.

"Here," he said softly and his tone alone told me that he hadn't just done it to get this over with quicker, because he thought I was slow.

He had done it because he knew that I wasn't fine. He had known that I was in pain and that getting off that damned stool would have been an arduous process. Had he... had he done it to be nice? Or had my hesitation frustrated him?

"T-thank you," I stammered, not really caring if he had done it out of frustration.

Whether he had intended to or not, he had done something nice for me. He had helped me... and not because he wanted anything from me. I had forgotten what that felt like, just someone being kind to me for the sake of it, not because they wanted to have sex with me or because they felt like they had to. It made my chest hurt and I didn't know why.

"Hn," he grunted like it was no big deal.

He looked away from me, but not fast enough. In those couple of seconds before he turned his face from view, long enough that I knew that I hadn't imagined it, his thin lips moved into a soft, pleased, and gentle smile. I felt something in me freeze at the sight of it and that painful feeling in my chest grew. It was then that I realized that my face felt hot. I was blushing. What the fuck?

I hastily looked back down on my work and tried to focus on what I had been doing before I had dropped my pencil, but it was impossible. Unbidden and unwanted, the image of Heero's quick smile was burned into my head forever. I didn't know what disturbed me more, that memory or my reaction to it, but I felt weird. Embarrassed, confused, awkward.

I had no clue what was going on. I wanted to pretend that it had never happened, that it was just another trick, an illusion, anything than what it was. But I knew. I had seen him smirk and laugh and snicker and sneer and I knew that none of those expressions had come close to this. That little, almost non-existent smile had been a real one, not something forced. It had just happened, probably against his will and when I had seen it, I could see the handsomeness that had drawn Relena to him. Did he smile at her like that? And why did that thought feel so ugly to me?

I struggled to keep my mind on our experiment, but found my thoughts constantly wandering back to that smile. It was a puzzle that I had absolutely no hope of solving and I wasn't sure if I really wanted to. After all, what reason could Yuy possibly have had for smiling like that, all because I had said thank you to him instead of telling him to go fuck himself? For all I knew, he was thinking of some snide, nasty thing about me. It was easy to believe that, so why didn't I? Why did it bother me so much?

Some stupid part of me wanted to believe in that smile, that he wasn't the horrible person that I knew that he was, but I wasn't that naive. Heero wasn't a quick, soft smile. He wasn't someone who gave a shit about me or my gratitude. He was the boy that had almost cut my hair on Zechs's say-so. He was Relena Darlian's boyfriend, the boyfriend to the bitch that had killed my best friend. He was the same person that laughed when she called me trash and a faggot. He was the same person who sneered at me and pushed me around along with all of his other shitty friends.

That image of him in my head was bolstered when my elbow accidentally got too close to his while I was writing and he shifted further away from me, like my closeness repulsed him. I couldn't equate that with the same person who had just smiled at me, so I decided not to. I had been seeing things, or that smile had been at my expense. I pushed the whole thing out of my head and clung to hate of him. It frightened me a little, how it made me feel relieved. I liked hating him. He was just another bully, just another nameless member of the crowd Relena dragged around with her to fuck with me, nothing else. I didn't want him to be anything else, I didn't want to believe in anyone else ever again when I knew better. I had had someone to believe in once and he had left me. I had dared to believe in Trowa and he had hurt me and betrayed me, too. No matter who I believed in, no matter who I decided to trust, they showed their true colors eventually. A smile didn't change the ugliness of the world I lived in. Because that smile made it worse, not better. I could handle someone hating me, I had lived with that my entire life. I couldn't handle someone choosing to hate me.

I shoved the whole thing out of my head as I suffered through the rest of the day. Heero turned in our experiment to the teacher and returned to his girlfriend's side, lamenting with her having to work with me. He told her that I smelled like garbage and they jeered at me together about how fags were supposed to be clean and prissy, not smell like a dumpster. I ignored the both of them, forcing my hatred of them down deep where it could simmer. Limping around for the rest of the day took too much out of me for my bitterness and anger to mean anything.

I spent my lunch in the library, not hungry and willing to lose myself in a book until the bell rang. The librarian even allowed me to get away with resting my leg on a chair. On my way to my next class, I passed by the nurse's office to grab a pass to get out of gym. The nurse hissed in sympathy when I showed her my swollen and bruised leg and it was pretty easy after that to get an ice pack and a pass from her. I used the ice pack through the rest of my classes until it finally got to room temperature, but it helped soothe some of the pain.

Already starting to forget my confusing and turbulent Chemistry class, I thought that I might just survive that day up until I passed Trowa in the hallway on my way to show my pass to Horner. I hadn't seen him since the night that I had broken up with him. To be honest, I had been avoiding him and I think he had been avoiding me to. He just walked right past me without a single look. Even when I dared to glance behind me, I didn't catch him noticing me at all, not even out of anger.

Watching him, for the first time in days, I realized how much I missed him. I was still pissed and bitter at him, but I felt this ache in my chest, this empty spot where he had once been. I had this urge to run up to him and kiss him one last time. It was stupid, and the desire wasn't that strong, but it was there. I missed kissing him. I missed having someone, some connection to another person. I wish that I could say that I hadn't thought of him at all until that moment, but even in taking care of Pepper, he was always in the back of my mind. I guess all people who go through break ups go through that, but it was new to me. I didn't even love him, but I still missed him and resented him at the same time.

I spent the rest of the school day wallowing in my bitterness, hating everything. I could say that it was from the pain that I was in, a constant reminder of the problems I had at home and my recent financial anxieties, but that was just a small part of it. Seeing Trowa again had only served to remind me that I couldn't escape my loneliness. Three years and I still wasn't used to it. It ate at me like a cancer. Pepper helped, but not all the time and not completely.

If my relationship with Trowa had taught me one thing, it was how much I missed Quatre and how, for all my acting tough and all my attempts to seal my heart away, I needed someone. The only times in our relationship that I had actually been happy were those moments when we could talk to each other and hold each other, touch each other without it becoming too sexual. I needed that.

I needed someone to talk to, even if it was about nothing. I needed someone to hug me, to pat my arm, hold my hand. I loved Pepper and she kept me from going completely insane with loneliness, but she could only listen to me. She wasn't a person. I didn't even know what I wanted. Being with Trowa had taught me that I was probably never going to want anyone, not sexually at any rate. I felt a loss at that, but it was small. I hadn't enjoyed sex enough to want it, but I wanted to be normal.

I didn't want what I had had with Trowa again and I wasn't going to have that. That I had managed to hook up with probably the only other gay kid in all of Nausten had been a miracle. I just wanted a friend. That was as impossible as a boyfriend for someone like me. I didn't want to live my life alone. I didn't even like myself enough to want to be around me. I just felt like I was drifting in a void, waiting for something to change.

Despite all of my better judgment, I went to my work shifts. I didn't go because I knew how much we were going to need that money soon or even because my leg was feeling a little bit better, but simply because I was so sick of feeling sorry for myself and miserable and pathetic. I needed to occupy myself or I was going to get overwhelmed with my depression.

Unfortunately, working didn't do a lot to distract me from my problems. It helped keep my mind off the pain in my leg and even off all of the shit that was going on with my dad, but not other things. I guess that's not too surprising, given what a mind field my thoughts were lately. But the really fucked up thing was that when my mind wandered as I worked, it wasn't Trowa that it wandered to, like I was so certain that it would. I kept thinking about Heero and that damn smile of his.

Working at the diner and pizza place wasn't too bad. Sal was pretty understanding when he saw me trying to limp from table to table and put me at the register instead and even let me go sit down when my leg started to bother me too much. Sal is a nice guy and despite his gruff attitude, he isn't a terrible boss to work for, unlike Andre, who can be a bit immature and pissy. He didn't take my injury nearly as well as Sal did, informing me that if I couldn't keep up with my coworkers, he was going to take me off the schedule for that week. Still, it was a slow night and I found myself mostly in the kitchen instead of waiting on tables.

Working at the factory was another matter. I ended up wasting more money using the bus again, but even that small reprieve from standing didn't make my injury feel any better. We had just gotten a shipment of copper tubing, steel rods, and various brackets to send off to the steel works and were sorting through the boxes. It wasn't that difficult. The group that I typically work with set up a conveyor belt to send the boxes from the shipping yard portion of the factory to the truck bay, it was just a matter of separating the overweight cargo from the rest. The steel works would have to send their own truck to us for the bigger parts.

I knew that working at that place that night was a shitty idea when, after we had set up the belt, my leg started to cramp up. I stupidly ignored it until I lifted up my fourth crate full of steel piping and my leg buckled under me. I, thankfully, know enough about injuries and things falling to know that dropping something heavy like that is dangerous and can get me hurt worse than some pulled leg muscles and swelling. Instead of freaking out as I instantly realized I was going to go down with the box, I just let the dumb thing fall and fell backwards, away from it, and stayed exactly where I was as my leg muscles spasmed painfully, leaving me feeling exhausted and strained as I fought against the twitching limb. I guess I had hit my limit for the day.

Lorathe, my shift supervisor, had a few choice words for me when I informed him that I wouldn't be able to move cargo with the rest of my coworkers because of my injury. Spoken at great volume. Lorathe hasn't liked me from the moment I got that job and isn't exactly shy about letting me know that fact. But I didn't file an injury report, which saved him a lot of paperwork and time and money, so I wasn't sent home and instead he stuck me in his office to file paperwork. It was boring as all hell and the man's filing system, or as I like to call it: 'clutter', leaved a lot to be desired, but I got to sit down in a comfortable chair and was left alone until my lunch hour when Solo showed up with his own lunch.

"Mind if I eat up here?" he asked me as he walked through the office door.

"Not my office," I said with a nonchalant shrug, but was secretly happy with his company.

Solo is the closest person I've had to a friend since Quatre died and about the only thing about that damned job that makes it bearable. Why he likes talking to me, I have no clue, but he treats me like his dorky, kid brother sometimes, despite the fact that he's more than a decade older than me. I think we get along because neither of us is well liked by any of our coworkers. An ex-con and an ex-cop's kid. What a fucking pair we were.

He sat down in the chair across from the desk that I was sitting at and opened his lunch bag, pulling out a can of beer and a turkey sandwich. He tossed half of the sandwich at me and I accepted it without any protests. I had learned a long time ago that Solo was the kind of man that did whatever the hell he wanted and trying to tell him otherwise was just a waste of time.

"You look like shit," he said plainly as I took a bite of the sandwich. It was bland to the point of almost being tasteless, "How's the leg?"

"Shitty," I quipped.

"Want some?" he offered me his can of beer with a wry grin, not at the least bit concerned that he was offering alcohol to a minor, and while he was working, no less.

I shook my head at him and he pulled a can of soda out of his bag, sliding it over to me. I rolled my eyes at him. It was a long standing joke between us from the first moment he had offered a beer to me and I had turned him down. Someone my age, and someone like me who was obviously not some kind of goody two shoes, turning down beer had seemed ridiculous to him.

"He wants to fire you, you know," Solo informed me candidly as we ate, "He just hasn't found the right excuse yet."

I didn't have to ask him for clarification, I knew that he was talking about our boss. I snorted.

"I'm sure he thought I would have scrubbed out by now," I grumbled.

I knew exactly what Lorathe's problem was. He didn't like being ordered around by someone like my father, and he sure as hell didn't like employing a teenager to do a job like this. He had been expecting me to be lazy and to use that to fire me. But I wasn't and he couldn't, not without pissing off my dad. Leverage is a wonderful thing, I guess.

"This is your second job, isn't it?" Solo asked me, brushing his long, dark blonde bangs out of his face when a few of them escaped the bandana he had tied them back with.

I raised up three fingers, taking a sip of the soda, and he shook his head in amazement.

"You're gunna die an early age, kid," he muttered without any kind of amusement, "You're young, you should be going out with your friends, chasing after pussy, and getting into an asinine amount of trouble, not working your ass off for chump change."

"Don't have any friends, don't have a girlfriend," I said very carefully, "and I've never been much of a troublemaker. I get into enough trouble with my dad without having done anything wrong as it is. And the money I make might be shit, but it's better than nothing at all."

"Well, that's exactly my point," he drawled, taking another bite of his sandwich, "Handsome kid like you should have a girlfriend. Maybe if your dad weren't working you to the bone, you'd have the chance."

"I'm not handsome," I muttered, knowing he was just joking around, "There's no one at my school I like and I've never had many friends anyway, so I don't mind helping my family out."

"Not a single girl? Not even a little, tiny crush?" he teased me.

I realized the danger that I was in with this kind of subject and immediately felt uncomfortable. Despite that, I found myself thinking about it. Again, I mourned my complete lack of a sex drive. There wasn't a single person that I was even slightly attracted to or even someone that I wanted to be friends with. My mind strayed again, but it thought of Heero again instead of Trowa and I felt perplexed. What did Yuy have to do with anything when Trowa was the one that I was missing?

"You ok?" my coworker asked me.

I blinked over at him in surprise.

"Yeah, why?"

"You just got real red," he pointed to my face.

Confused, I touched my cheek and felt that it was indeed hot, but I couldn't figure out why. I didn't feel embarrassed by what we were talking about, so why was I blushing?

"Maybe I'm getting sick," I murmured under my breath.

Solo stopped eating to stare at me intently, like he was studying me for something. I felt a brief thrill of fear, worrying in paranoia that he suspected that there was another reason why I didn't have a girlfriend, but that was ridiculous. I had never given anyone any reason to suspect that I was gay and Solo wasn't the sort of person to worry about someone's sexuality outright. He dug around in his pocket and pulled out a card, looking at it for a minute before sliding it across the desk to me.

"Here."

I flipped it over and read the name of a construction company, quirking an eyebrow at him.

"If you insist on working yourself to death," Solo said gruffly, "I think you can do better than just waiting tables."

"I don't understand," I looked down at the business card again, recognizing the company as a pretty small one that had set up shop in South Nausten a few years ago.

"I think you do," he grinned at me, resting his cheek on his fist, "Lemme guess. I bet you work your ass off at your jobs, only to let your dad take every cent from you to do whatever he likes with it, right?"

I nodded and felt something ugly coil in my gut.

"My dad lost his job," I suddenly blurted out before I could stop myself, "His boss caught him coming in drunk again. Now it's just Mom and I paying the bills, I guess, until he can find something."

I couldn't get my mouth to stop moving, couldn't stop myself from telling Solo things that he hadn't even asked about, things that I was ashamed of. I'd say that I don't know why, but I do. How long had it been since I could really talk to someone and tell them about the things that I was anxious about? I could never talk to Trowa about them and even when Quatre had been alive, there had been so many things that I had never told him about. How long can a person stay silent and lonely before the right person comes along to open them up? I'm not saying that Solo was the right person, but my anxiety over my dad's recent loss of employment was like a burst pipe in me, filling me with ice water, and Solo was the first person that I had talked to since I had broken up with Trowa that was willing to listen to me. I couldn't help letting that ice water leak out a little bit before I exploded with it.

"I didn't mind," I told him, "giving Dad my paychecks because I was pretty sure that it was helping us pay our bills and buy groceries. But now... I'm worried that he's going to use that money to go out and get drunk with his stupid friends. I can't handle that-"

I bit my tongue before I could confess to how furious the thought of that made me. Maybe my jobs weren't as difficult and frustrating as my dad's had been, but goddamn it, I wasn't working for Dad to steal my money to buy beer and while I wish that I could just live in denial and say that wouldn't happen, I knew that it would. I remembered the argument that had landed me in the hospital with glass stuck all over my body. I remembered how my father had fucked over our grocery budget just so he could buy some beer. It hadn't been the last time that that had happened, and his drinking was getting a lot worse, so was Mom's.

How long before he let us go hungry so he could get wasted? How long before he let some of the bills go because he got thirsty? I wanted to cry. I think if Quatre had been the one that I was talking to, and not a coworker, I would have. I felt like Sisyphus, pushing my rock up the hill, working hard so my parents wouldn't have to worry about their bills so much, only to watch that rock fall back to the bottom on the other side and realize just how little that hard work meant in the end.

"I'm sorry," I muttered, "You don't need to know about all that."

I thought that he might call me a pussy for unloading on him, forgetting that Solo isn't Relena or Zechs or even my father. He just smirked at me without any kind of humor and I felt relieved that I didn't see any pity in his dark green eyes, just understanding. He took an apple pastry out of his bag, something that he had obviously bought at some convenience store, broke it in half and gave it to me. It tasted overly sweet and there was more jelly filling in it than apples, but I didn't mind.

"Hey, don't worry about it," he assured me, "I had a dad like that, too. One of the things that got me into stealing cars and selling pot was I was sick of him leeching off of me and just wanted to get away. But it doesn't have to be like that, Duo," he gestured to the card that he had given me, "You don't have to scrape by with minimum wage jobs. Those people pay a decent wage and the work's not bad."

"Why would they hire me?" I pointed out, "I'm not even seventeen yet, they couldn't hire me legally and no one ever expects a teenager to be a hard worker."

"But you are," Solo insisted, "I work with you, remember? You're not lazy, even if you're not as strong as the other guys here. As for legally, well," he scratched his chin in a sheepish gesture, "they have a few workers that aren't exactly on the right side of legal, if you know what I mean. Paying people under the table isn't something the owner is shy to. And they'll hire you because if you tell me you're interested, I'm going to vouch for you."

"You work for them?" I asked.

"Have since I got out. They were the only ones that would for awhile," he said and I caught the edge of bitterness on his words, "It's hard work, I won't lie, but it's better than unloading cargo. Sometimes you get to help tear down houses, put 'em up, or just do a painting job. And it pays better than this gig at your pay level."

I sighed.

"I don't have time for a fourth job, not with my schoolwork-" I started to protest.

"I'm not talking about a fourth job, kid," Solo rolled his eyes at me, "I'm talking about quitting one of your other jobs and taking this one on behind your father's back. You can give him what he thinks you're making at your old job and pocket the difference without him even knowing. You'll be more tired at the end of the day, but you'll have a bit of money to fall back on if you're dad fucks around on the bills."

I thought about that, about the likelihood if I could get away with a scheme like that. Did I want to risk it? It sounded like a better job to me than waiting tables, but I felt like it was a disaster waiting to happen. Making more money sounded like a dream come true, but what if I got caught working at a place like that when I wasn't supposed to? What if my dad caught me working there and that I had been hiding money from him? But on the other hand, I would have money for groceries if we fell short, and I could buy Pepper things instead of begging Mrs. Liddle for chores to do. It wouldn't be a complete solution for our financial problems, but it would be better than what I was making, a step in the right direction.

"Can I think about it?" I asked.

"Of course," Solo snorted and took another sip of his beer, "Not like there's an expiration date to this."

He finished off his beer and threw out the trash of our brief meal, our break time over.

"Thanks, Solo," I called out as he went to leave.

"Accept the offer, Duo," he waved with his back to me, "You're too young to be gettin' an ulcer already."

I shook my head at his candor and looked down at the business card again, but it didn't help me make up my mind and I slipped it into my pocket. At least I had something else to think about instead of Trowa, Heero, Relena, or my father.
End Part 2
Author's Note: I wasn't going to end this part here, since the next scene would have been the perfect way to end part 2, but things were getting too long, and while I had the first 20 pages of this finished over a week ago, I took a break to reread some earlier parts of this story. I didn't want to keep people waiting for me to get my ass in gear for the next scene, so I cut it short.
　

　
- 21
- 22
- 23
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

A Stagnation of Love (rewrite)