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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
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A Stagnation of Love

Chapter 2

Part 1
　

March 11, 2004
　

I forgot about this for a bit. I meant to write more in the morning, but Dad was on the warpath. He had twenty dollars missing from his wallet. He had probably just lost track of it when he had gotten smashed that night, but Mom had already been at work, so I had been his only target. I had tucked this journal under my mattress that night before going to bed, but as he had torn up my room looking for his money, he had almost discovered it. I don't know what my father might do if he ever caught me with this thing, if he'd just call me a pussy for keeping something as girly as a diary, regardless of the reason why I was keeping it, or if he'd be pissed about the things I was writing.

Luckily, his short temper had kept him from doing a thorough search. In his frustration, he had settled for taking all of the money that I had had in my wallet: the two fives and ten ones I had been meticulously saving from my jobs to pay for Quatre's birthday present. I shouldn't have been angry about it. Buying Quatre a present was useless, but I had decided to get in anyway, in case that he might... it might be able to reach him somehow.

It was stupid, twenty bucks was a lot of money for me, but I just couldn't spend it on anything else, just like the five dollars my father also took out of my wallet, stating it was a tax for lying and stealing from him, along with the black eye he had gifted me with. Quatre had given me that five dollar bill a month ago, on the last day I had seen him. It had been for lunch the next day, but it had just sat there, the very last thing I had from him, beyond my memory of his sad smile that day at the train station. Watching my dad storm back down the steps, I wish that I had spent it. I would have cried then, but I didn't think I was physically capable of crying anymore.

I thought about maybe hiding the journal in my locker at school, but I was too scared that Relena, Zechs, or one of their friends might get at it. After what they had done to Quatre, I couldn't bear that. So instead I pried up some of the loose boards in my room and made a little compartment to hide things. I stashed the CDs and Discman Quatre had given me, the only pic of the two of us I had , and a few of my favorite books in there, just in case my dad got one of his cruel streaks and decided to destroy my stuff. I had lost some library books and cassette tapes that way.

I just kind of forgot that this journal was in there with everything that's been going on at school lately. I almost flunked a big math test a few days ago, but Mrs. Sully had been sympathetic, I'm pretty sure she pitied me since she knew how close Quatre and I had been, and had let me take some one on one tutoring with her after school that week to make up for it. My dad had been too busy with work to figure out I hadn't been coming home right away, not that I thought he'd care so long as he hadn't heard about the failed test and my chores still got done. The school therapist, Mr. Schuller, had reminded me about the journal. I guess I can keep up with it. I still don't think it's going to fucking help but it's something to do at night. It's not like I'm sleeping.

Where was I the last time I wrote in this thing? Oh, right, the day I met Quatre. There's really not much to tell. I finished washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, and made some tuna casserole with what we had left of the canned tuna with breadcrumbs of what we had left of the white bread we'd been using to make tuna sandwiches. The bread was too stale to use for sandwiches anyway. I had seen Mom make this enough times that I could do it on my own, which was fortunate because I didn't think Mom was in shape to even care about food at that moment. I had dinner ready by the time Dad got home. As we ate, no one asked me how my first day of school had been, but Dad hadn't been in a bad mood, either, so I didn't care.

After dinner I did what little homework Mrs. Khushrenada had given us and went to bed. I should have been dreading the next school day given what Relena had done and felt some kind of fear about the bully, but as I dozed off it was my new friend and my excitement to see him again that had been on my mind.

Rinse and repeat. The next two years went exactly like that. Nothing changed, for better or worse for me through the fourth and fifth and first half of the sixth grade. My parents still drank, we were still poor, my dad was still abrasive and my mother still ignored my presence. I still sucked at math, Relena still made mine and Quatre's lives Hell, and I never did make anymore friends. I was still the freak, and Relena went out of her way to make sure I and the rest of our peers were reminded of that on a daily basis.

It wasn't all terrible, though. Quatre was still my best friend. He still smiled at me and laughed with me, that never changed. I still remained at the head of my English classes and I even won the school spelling bee in the fifth grade. It had made Relena's bullying worse for awhile, as well as the teasing from my classmates for being a 'nerd', and neither of my parents had given a shit, but I had gotten a cake from my then English teacher and a hug from Quatre, so I guess it had been worth it. Honestly, I didn't care that I had won and it didn't make me feel any smarter or better than I had before, but it had been fun.

The school finally finished repairs on the fourth and fifth grade classrooms that Summer, so we got to move into the wing for the older kids at the start of the fifth grade. It was nice to have bigger desks, but the biggest difference was that we shared the halls now with the older kids. Most importantly, we now shared the hall and several of our elective classes with Zechs Dorlian.

Relena's older brother reminded me a lot of the hardened teens that loitered in front of the convenience stores in my side of town. Teenagers with nothing better to do than to make everyone else's life miserable, defacing property, starting fights, and smoking. The only difference was that Zechs came from an upstanding family, his clothes were expensive and he had had everything handed to him in his life. None of that seemed to matter to him. Even in the seventh grade, Zechs was all hard edges, the sort of boy even the teachers stayed away from if they could. He was handsome, but never got asked out by any of the girls. He was too dangerous and frightening, his ugly personality nullifying his looks. He wasn't even that friendly with his own sister, but at the same time, it was known amongst my classmates that anyone who crossed Relena's path would get it twice as bad from her brother, so who knew what their relationship was really like.

As we entered the fifth grade, I took the advice Quatre had given me a year ago to heart. I stayed far, far, far away from Zechs. If I so much as saw a glance of his silver hair, I made sure to go the opposite way. Even still, it would have been easy for him to corner me, but for a year and a half, I never had a problem with him. I couldn't figure out why that was. He was a nightmare to Quatre and I am horribly ashamed to say this now, when Zechs started in with Relena terrorizing my best friend, I didn't do much to help him. Quatre had made me promise not to. He had said that I was insanely lucky that the imposing teenager left me alone, and I shouldn't do anything to change that.

My reasons for not trying to stop Zechs were partially because of that promise, but it was also because Zechs scared the hell out of me. The way he went after Quatre was just vicious, like a hyena after a baby gazelle. It was rarely ever physical. I think I saw Zechs hit him maybe four times that year. The teenager's tactics were more emotional and psychological, and more brutal than a simple punch.

Probably the mildest I saw him do was destroy the mp3 player Quatre's step-mother had given him for his birthday. He tripped him, pushed him, cut up his gym clothes, ripped out whole pages in his textbook, stole Quatre's cell phone, put lewd pictures in his locker, and one time he shoved so much cayenne pepper in Quatre's nose that he couldn't stop vomiting for hours and had to go to the hospital.

So I stayed away from it. And when Quatre came to me bruised and crying so hard I thought he would make himself sick, I held him tightly and told him everything would be ok. I lied to my best friend and I hated myself more than I ever had in my entire life. Every wound, every tear, I blamed myself for. But I still didn't try to stop it. What could I do, I asked myself. Zechs was bigger and stronger than I was. I had a hard enough time dealing with his little sister. If I fought back, he'd put me in the hospital at the very least. If I went to a teacher, they would just shrug it off and ignore me. Keeping myself safe and trying to comfort Quatre afterwards was all I could do. All of those arguments were entirely logical to me and I knew they weren't wrong, but it didn't stop the self-disgust I felt at my cowardice.

Quatre couldn't even get away from the bastard after school. It wasn't fair, but in that regard I had lucked out. Thanks to where I lived, even when Zechs started in on me in the sixth grade, I almost never saw him outside of school, unlike Quatre. I guess it's pointless to explain, since no one is going to read this, but Mrs. Khushrenada had told me to write about anything that upsets me and this contributed to something that upset me a lot.

Our town is, essentially, like a giant compass if you really look at where things are. Like most towns, the wealthy and the poor live on opposite ends from each other, with the middle class scattered on one end or the other depending on their jobs, either finances or location. The very center of town is made up of public buildings, the elementary and high schools, the town library, the town hall, the station my dad works at, the bigger, corporate built chain restaurants, the strip mall, and the hospital. The further north you go from the center, the nicer the homes and buildings get, and the further south you go, the worse everything gets.

Each part of town has its own landmarks and revenue draws. The rich folks to the north get the best of it, obviously. The local park, upscale restaurants, pubs, and the big mall are there. They also are the closest to the beach to the north west of town. If you own any of the restaurants or shops on the boardwalk or anywhere near the motel, you make bank in the summer. Summer tourism is big in our town thanks to that beach. Out-of-towners have to pay the town to use the beach, but even if you live way down south, you can still use the beach for free. There is even a bus stop a few blocks down from my house that takes me right to the beach in just twenty minutes.

My side of town isn't as lucky. We get the dives, the restaurants that are cheap, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I work at two of those cheap diners and they let me take home leftovers some nights. They do decently for themselves, but they aren't what you would call four or five star establishments. There are no malls or parks on my side of town. However, we have most of the bars, the only two strip joints in town, and the town dump which guarantees us weekly trash pick ups unlike the folks that live north and have to drive to the dump and pay for dump stickers on their cars. We also have the railroad which runs along the south west.

That railroad had always been a bittersweet thing in my mind. The railroad had brought with it corporate interest, jobs, factories, and a huge chunk of Nausten's profits. It had also brought with it pollution and a large amount of homeless folk that stowed away in the cars and jumped off at the station. Some of them found jobs in the factories and stayed, but most of them kept moving on. To the people who had worked at the factories and railroad for years, the vagrants were worse than illegal immigrants, and every year without fail a few of them would be assaulted or even turn up dead in some extreme cases.

Beyond that, most people didn't care about the air pollution from the factories or the noise pollution from the trains or the drug traffic that swept through with the railroad. Most of the people that lived in my side of town only cared about the jobs such places had brought, jobs that kept them from moving any further south. They were just like my dad, they wanted to make their money and be left alone. Once in a blue moon, some environmental group showed up to protest the industry down here, but they never lasted long. The railroad might not have been the best thing for us, but it was convenient. If you lived down here and worked the railroad ior in one of the factories, you didn't need to have a car, your job was either within walking distance or you could take one of the public buses for a five minute commute.

When I had been little, I had loved the train station. My father had taken me there a few times on weekends. He had packed us lunches and we had gone and sat on the grassy hill that overlooked the tracks. We had sat there, ate our sandwiches, mine almost always a peanut butter and jelly, watched the trains go by and tried to guess out loud what each car might be carrying. When I had gotten a bit older, I liked to go down to the dock where they unloaded the cargo and the workers disembarked on and watched the trains go past. I would stand there and pretend that I was the one moving, not the trains, moving far away from where I was.

Then I grew up and stopped going there. I looked at the railroad and surrounding factories with bitterness instead of joy because I knew, sooner or later, that was exactly where I was going to end up. I could imagine I was on those trains, going to some distant place, but that would never happen. I'm not special. I'm not a brainiac or a prodigy. I don't have any useful talents or skills. If I'm lucky, I'll end up like my dad, in a job I hate, in a house I'll never really own, always angry and miserable, barely able to pay the bills, but still able.

But I'll probably end up on that railroad or in one of those factories, making almost nothing, working myself into an early grave so I could scrape by in some shitty apartment. If I'm honest with myself, I know that's exactly where I'll end up, just another dead beat loser from the south end. I try not to think about that too much. And now, after Quatre decided to abandon me without so much as saying goodbye, I hate that train station more than I ever. Every time I hear the 'ding, ding' from the warning sign or the roar of the trains from my house, I feel sick.

That got away from me. Where was I? Oh, Quatre and Zechs. Yeah, I got lucky. I live far away from where Zechs does, so we only run into each other a handful of times outside of school. Quatre wasn't that fortunate. He, Zechs, and Relena all lived on the same street, so whenever he left the house, he knew that he was risking running into one of them someplace where there were no teachers watching. Not that they did much to stop them at school, but it was enough to give them limits, boundaries.

The Winners and Dorlians are old families around here, and had probably been here since the town had been founded. The Dorlians have been rich since before they ever migrated to this country hundreds of years back. They used that money to help their community whether it be giving to charity, the school systems, or give whatever funding the town needs. When our town library had burned down one unbearably dry summer, their money had single handedly seen it rebuilt, bigger and grander than before. They spent a couple million every summer during the 4th of July festival, making our quaint town as welcoming to tourists as possible. Relena and Zechs's parents are nothing like them, and I have no idea why their children turned out to be such monsters. They're nice people, the sort that throw bake sales and show up to every PTA meeting.

The Winners had been decently well off before they had become involved in a certain company that was responsible for the construction of our railroad. Over the generations they had become as wealthy as the Dorlians and had won contracts with a lot of the businesses that had set up their factories here. The two families, arguably the most influential if not the most wealthy, had become fast friends both socially and professionally, so Quatre had been subjected to the two siblings a lot more times than at school or random encounters. I honestly don't know how he found the strength to smile.

When I became twelve that year, just months before I began to share Quatre's nightmares of Zechs Dorlian, my dad decied that I was old enough that I needed to start helping the family out financially. He called it getting a job. I called it him heaping another chore on me. And really, that's all my jobs were, chores. Dad set me up with two of them and I hated them from day one. I'm sure everyone says that about their jobs, even well paying ones, but I hated everything about them.

I fell into a routine that never seemed to end. I go to school from 8 am to 3 pm, rush over to the dive pizza joint I work at during the week days until 8:30 pm, run home and start on my homework, then repeat it all the next day. The only days I have off at that job are Wednesdays. The work is so boring, I find myself reciting math equations and vocab words I need to remember for my homework in my head. Because I'm under-aged, and getting paid under the table, all I can do is clean, wash dishes, and make pizza boxes. In just a week, I had started to hate the smell of pizza grease and frozen pepperoni.

The only good thing about it is my boss lets me take home pizza from the leftover dough for my dinner. Even after I got sick of eating pizza, friend food, and soda, I never get sick of having something to eat that isn't cold or almost stale, or when my father said we could save money and dinner the nights he and mom decide to have some, too. That was the first time in my life he had ever made me feel useful.

During the weekends, I work from 10am to 4pm both Saturday and Sunday at a diner basically doing the same work at the pizza joint; cleaning the tables, doing the dishes, making sure the tables were stocked with ketchup, tabasco sauce, napkins, clean silverware, ect. Dad wanted me to work longer hours there, plus additional hours at the pizza joint during the weekends, but both of my bosses refused, telling him that they weren't going to take hours away from their full time employees during peak hours like that. The only reason why I had gotten those jobs was because they had owed my dad some sort of favor, and I'm not entirely sure that favor was on the positive side of legal or at least ethical, so he wasn't going to put up a fuss about that. My bosses were clearly scared enough of my father and their 'favors' to not piss him off, but they could equally make trouble for him.

I only make eight bucks an hour, definitely not enough to survive on, but enough to help with our bills after our electric and oil got hiked significantly that year. We still scrape to make by, but as long as we aren't stupid about our finances, we do get by. Things got bad that year for everyone and they certainly haven't got any better. I don't know the specifics and economics just gives me a headache. I do know that our school librarian lost her job two years ago and they still haven't replaced her, just one of the many 'cutbacks' that the town went through. Right now the school library is staffed by volunteers, mostly parents.

Some of the upper middle class and upper class families were hit, something to do with stocks, and a few of them found their way towards our side of town, but families like the Dorlians and Winners remained rich and life continued on in our town. Like always, the art programs at our school and the high school suffered, but the football team got enough donations to get new uniforms and repairs done to their bus. The rich side of town still looked beautiful.

Meanwhile, two of our neighbors had to move out of their houses. They had both worked at the electric works on our side of town and had been working there for over thirty years, but they had gotten laid off in favor of two north enders that had only been there for ten. 'Connections' my father had grumbled, 'fuck experience and company loyalty, all those assholes care about are your connections.' I didn't know exactly what that meant, only that in listening to my dad talk about his own office politics, it was usually the north enders that had connections and the south enders didn't.

On our side of town, a whole lot of Hell got raised by those lay offs and some kids, probably the kids of those who got laid off, raided the north side of town and graffiti'd some truly nasty stuff on the houses of the two north enders that had gotten to keep their jobs. My dad was the one that got the call to arrest them. He had been in a foul mood when he had come home, and I can understand that. Being called in at three in the morning to arrest some teenagers was one thing, arresting some teenagers whose actions my father understood and sympathized with had been way out of his realm of priorities. I don't know if I really sympathize with those kids since they just slapped with some fines and community service work. I spent my first week of school that year with a sprained wrist and three broken ribs because of them.

Not much changed at home from the fourth grade to the fifth grade. I had hoped that going to school and getting out of my parents' way would have made them easier to live with, that by not being around to piss them off so much would have made them happier. All that changed was that my mother upgraded from the wine she had been drinking to vodka. A year later, she would start to drink whiskey, and I'm pretty sure she started to take drugs when I was halfway through the fifth grade. Her drunken stupors had started to take on this almost comatose look for her. She would stare off into space a lot, lost to the world. She still never looked happy about it, she never smiled when she was like it, so if she was on drugs, I couldn't figure out why. My Dad's temper had only gotten worse in that year and the amount of times he had hit me had escalated.

I got through all of it, though. Thanks to Quatre and my classes, I got through. Even Relena's bullying hadn't tempered our friendship or how much I relied on him to distract me from my problems. I hate that now, but it's true. I should have been there as the distraction for him, but it never seemed that way to me. I was always so consumed with depression over Relena, my parents, and how we were living. It seemed so rare those moments when I would stop and ask Quatre how things in his life were going. I had justified it back then, because if Quatre really needed me, he would seek me out. He would cry and hug me, or blurt out what the problem was. That was the sort of person he was, he wore everything on his sleeve, out in the open. That's how Relena and Zechs were so capable of tearing him apart so often, he didn't have the ability to hide anything from anyone. When it came to me, he had to pry my problems from me, and he was well aware of that. He always succeeded, but he was always alert with me, focused on the things that were making me upset.

We didn't hang out at each other's houses. I guess that's a really odd thing to admit. We were best of friends, and shared everything; our problems, our lunches, our dreams, our nightmares, even our bullies, but we never shared each other's home lives beyond talking about them. I was too ashamed of my house, where I lived, and especially my parents to ask him over. What would he think of the rotten porch steps? The rust on almost all of our faucets, along with the reversed water temperature controls in our shower and the kitchen light that flickered at random moments? What would he think about my parents' drinking habits, how much they yelled and cursed or, and I always blushed with shame thinking of this, what if he saw my father hit me?

Quatre already knew that my father beat me. There wasn't a single day that I come to school with a new bruise, a new broken arm, and new limp. He would always look at me with this expression that was half sad, half angry, but we never talked about it. We didn't need to talk about it. Quatre was smart enough to know that I was getting it at home by one of my parents, if not both, and he was also smart enough to know that I didn't want to talk about it. But that didn't mean that I wanted him to see it, either. He had enough problems at his own home, I had told myself, he didn't need to be worrying about mine as well. If I was having a problem, I would only talk about my injuries, how they hurt, or fights my dad and I had, but never about the actual hitting. I don't know why exactly, if it was just shame, or if I was scared to admit the problem out loud.

I had gotten old enough by that point that I had realized that my father's abuse was not normal. I'm sure there were other kids from homes like mine where their father, mother, sibling, or another family member was beating them, but I noticed all those other kids who didn't come to school bruised and hurting, whose parents picked them up from school with a hug or went to our school concerts, sports, and plays. My father's behavior was abnormal, and that only made it all the more painful for me. It made me wonder why he was like that, if it was something I had done wrong a very long time ago, if it was all my fault. Eventually, a big reason why I didn't talk to Quatre about it became my fear that Quatre would try to do something about it.

I don't mean that I was afraid Quatre would try to make my father stop. The idea of that was incredibly ludicrous. Quatre was tiny, my Dad wasn't. But what if he decided to tell another adult about? My father, the cop, wouldn't get into trouble, I was sure, but I would get into trouble, big trouble. And what if Dad did get into trouble? What if he got arrested? I hated that he hit me, but I still loved him, he was my father. I didn't want him to go to jail because I couldn't keep my mouth shut. The beatings hurt, but I had lived with them up until then. I could live with them longer.

Another big part of why I didn't want Quatre to come over was that I couldn't pinpoint the source of my father's anger. He hit my mother, too, even blamed her sometimes if I fucked up. What if he hit Quatre? The thought of that horrified me. I wanted to protect Quatre from all of the bad things. I couldn't protect him from Zechs or Relena, but I could protect him from my father.

I don't know why Quatre never invited me over to his house. At first I had thought that he might be ashamed of me. His proud father's only son's only friend, a loser from the south end who wore the same clothes three times a week, worked illegally to help support his family, and was a good for nothing in every way that counted. I only had those misconceptions for the first few months of our friendship. I quickly learned that Quatre just didn't see me that way. He liked me, for some reason I just couldn't fathom, and wasn't ashamed of that. Maybe he just hadn't wanted me to feel bad about where and how he lived, or maybe he was just as embarrassed by his parents as I was.

Sometimes I wonder if he saw his parents' neglect the same way I saw my father's abuse. The beatings and verbal abuse had been in my life for so long, I couldn't imagine my life without them. The pain and my father were tangled up in my mind, I couldn't have one without the other. Maybe Quatre couldn't imagine his life without that abandonment, without going home to a dark and silent house. I don't like thinking about that. I want to believe that Quatre had some kind of hope that his life would get better one day, even if I know now that that isn't true.

Quatre never caught up to me in terms of height. I got taller, though I was still averagely tall, and he barely did. He never stopped smiling, but I watched, helplessly, as the loneliness and abandonment he felt at home, and the bullying made that light in his eyes dull just a bit more every year we were friends. It matured him, like my own problems had matured me. Every time I realized that about him, I wanted to bash his parents' heads in for being so oblivious to their own child, but who was I to talk? I couldn't help Quatre and I couldn't help myself.

I hate that. I hate that I never had the strength to help him, when Quatre is the only reason why I survived this long. Him being my friend kept me happy, hopeful, and without him... I don't want to think about what I'll become without him. Nothing around here every changes. If it does change, it's always something worse, never better. Even when something better does happen, it never stays long. Every time I think I understand the world, every time I think I can understand my life and get used to it, something changes and I fall flat on my face.

I think Quatre felt the same way. Maybe that's the real reason why he left. It wasn't just the bullying, or that he was lonely, it was because as filthy rich as he was, Quatre was no different than I was. His entire future had been planned for him, not by fate but by his parents. All Quatre ever was in the eyes of his father was the next one in line, the son that would take over the business for him. I know that Quatre didn't want that anymore than I wanted to end up like my father, but just because you can see where your future is going to end up, it doesn't mean that you can change it.

Maybe Quatre decided he had to leave this place because he was smarter than me. He saw his fate and, like me, lost all hope. But unlike me, he wasn't willing to just accept that, to just stay stuck in one place for the rest of his life. Maybe he just didn't want things to change for the worse again. Or maybe Mrs. Khushrenada was right and my best friend had just been very sad and very unhappy. I hope that, wherever he ended up, he's finally happy.

My life took one of those changes in the second semester of our fifth grade, one of those changes for the worse that made me wonder if there was some sort of force out there that hated me. I'll always remember the date it happened. April 3rd, 2003. It was a Tuesday. Quatre had been planning to go to my job after school that day with me. He did that a lot, just chilled out with me during my shift. At first my boss had been irritated by it, but when he saw that it didn't affect my work any, he let Quatre stay. He would sit in one of the booths doing his homework or listening to music as I washed the dishes and cleaned the tables. When time came to fold the pizza boxes, he would come talk to me as I did it, and we would share my lunch break together. Some days, Quatre being there was the only thing that kept me sane in my boredom, and I like to think that he enjoyed being there instead of being alone at home.

That day had been a half day at work for me. One of my full time coworkers needed the extra shift that night, so my boss had agreed to let me out a bit early. My dad hadn't known and I had been looking forward to spending those hours with Quatre. We were going to go out and go to a restaurant. He had been saving up his allowance especially to take me out to some place he had found a few weeks back with one of his sisters and thought I would like it. I honestly didn't care what the food was like. It was free food and I could spend more time with him. But we never made it, I didn't even go to work that night.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Quatre and I had almost all of our classes together, except for Math and English. I struggled my way through every math course I had ever taken, but I had just managed to not land myself in remedial math somehow. Quatre was a different story. He loved math. He loved equations and numbers and, unlike in our philosophy and English courses, there was always only the right answer. There was no ambivalence in math and he liked how black and white that was. He had taken to it like I had taken to English, another class we didn't take together. I had gotten into advanced placement English, and he had gotten into advanced placement Math.

So when it happened, I was completely alone, rushing my way to my own math class. I had been thinking about my math homework and how much I was looking forward to going out to eat with Quatre that night, so I can honestly say that the most of what happened was probably my fault. I was jostled out of my thoughts when someone pushed me. If I had been paying attention, I would have just evaded it and continued on my way, and maybe most of what had happened could have been avoided, but I hadn't. I barely had the time to react as someone grabbed me by my arm and pulled me out of the crowd of kids to a more secluded spot of the hallway near some lockers. I felt a chill seeing who it was that had grabbed me.

Relena. Just thinking about her now makes my skin prickle, but back then I had felt mostly angry that she was going to make me late for class, and wondering what she wanted to do to me this time. She hadn't really changed that much since the fourth grade, either. She had remained the same height as me, so she was actually taller than Quatre, but most importantly she had remained a bitch. And I was still scared of her. She still wore pink dresses that I thought didn't suit her at all, but her mother had long since given up curling her light brown hair. It was straight and free falling down her back that day. I was till haunted every time she did something to me or Quatre by the impulse to just punch her in her arrogant face.

But every time I thought about it, pushing her down and breaking that stuck up nose of hers, I felt a shiver of pleasure go through me. I had long ago lost count of the number of times she had shoved me around, taunted me, called me disgusting things, and tried to get me to eat even more disgusting things, and the idea that I could pay her back for all of those years without her being able to do much about it because at twelve years old, I was physically stronger than her, gave me this intense sense of power and control. Two things I have severely lacked since the day I was born. The fantasy of it made me feel good, but that pleasure terrified me. I would think 'is this how Dad feels when he hits me?' and that thought alone assured that I never could hit her.

I wish I had had the courage to hit her that day. Maybe then she would have kept her mouth shut. I didn't though. I had known that anything I did to her, she would eventually pay me back for, times five. If I hit her, all it would get me was an expulsion from school and a visit from her big brother. No matter what I did, I couldn't win, I had accepted that a long time ago. I think it was easier for me to accept than Quatre. As a child, he had been taught about things like fairness and that the bad guys always lose. So dealing with Relena, who he couldn't fight against, had probably rankled against those early taught lessons.

I had lived with my father and no one had ever told me that the world was supposed to be fair. If they had, I would have assumed they were lying to me. When you live with a man like my father, you learn that every day is just a series of battles. Some of them you might win, if you're fast enough or well behaved enough, but most of them you will lose and you have to learn to accept those loses or it'll just drive you crazy. Even if your day is filled by winning battles, if you go that whole day without getting hit or yelled at, or if you're stupid enough to try to make it stop, tomorrow would come. Tomorrow would come and you'd learn that none of yesterday means shit all and it just starts all over again. So what's the point of even trying for one day? It just makes you feel tired, and then they win anyway. I think that's something that took Quatre too long to learn, that expecting to win is the worst thing you can possibly do.

"I need to speak to you," she hissed at me lowly, not wanting the people around us to listen even as the bell rang, signaling the beginning of that block of classes and the throng of people thinned out.

I blinked stupidly at her. She had my immediate attention, even more than she usually did. This wasn't one of her usual games. She didn't have her intense focus and determination, but was fidgeting. There was a bright blush across her face and instead of staring me in the eyes, her eyes were everywhere else, as though she couldn't bear to look at me. She was embarrassed, I realized with shock, and anxious.

For the first time since she had started to bully me two years ago, I studied her, not like prey would study a predator, but I saw her as just a girl who wanted to tell me something. I wanted to be defensive, to see this as just another one of her tricks, but I couldn't. She didn't have it in her to fake this. She looked... vulernable, the one thing that Relena Dorlian didn't have it in her to be.

I watched, perplexed, as she grasped the frilly, bottom hem of her top and fussed with it, like she was struggling with whatever she wanted to tell me. I wanted to tell her to hurry up and spit it out, but as much as I hated her, I just couldn't. I felt like I was seeing her for the first time, the real person behind the bully, like the girl that I had known since the fourth grade was just a mask. She had humiliated me, made Quatre and mine's lives at school terrible, but here I was feeling bad for her and I had no idea why.

"I... I like you," she murmured in a voice so small I could barely hear her above the chatter in the hallway.

"No you don't," I said in confusion.

How could she possibly say that she liked me? She obviously didn't like me at all. I remembered all the times she had looked at me with contempt or said something malicious. She flushed even darker and looked frustrated.

"This is stupid," she grumbled, "I never should have listened to Zechs..."

"What is it?" I suddenly blurted out and although I hadn't meant for it to come out that way, I couldn't stop the slightly harsh tone to my voice, so used to talking to her that way.

She flinched at the tone of my voice, as if I had just hit her, and I was filled with this sense of surrealism. It felt as if, for that one second, our roles had been reversed. Her blue eyes glanced shyly at mine for a moment, looking for something there. I doubt she saw anything but obliviousness and confusion. It seemed to make her more flustered and irritated.

"Dammit, I'm trying to say... to say... I really, really, really like you Duo," she ground out like just saying those words were physically taxing to her, like she was chewing on glass.

My eyes went wide and I stared at her like she was some kind of great white elk in my midst. Like she had gone insane. What was she... was she saying that she had a crush on me?! But that wasn't possible, she hated me... didn't she? At that moment, I remembered a scene from an old television show I had watched years ago. It had been some flat, high school drama about a young boy, just a few years older than me if I remember correctly, lamenting about how this girl in his class was always picking on him. He had told his father this and his father had laughed and said something like 'oh, she probably just has a crush on you. Girls pick on boys that they like.' Was that what this was? Relena had been bullying me because she liked me? But that made no sense to me. I just could not conceive the idea... the mere possibility that she had any feelings towards me beyond hate and disgust.

"I... I don't understand," I said truthfully.

Relena huffed in angry frustration and before I could defend myself, she pressed her lips to mine.

I had never been kissed by a girl in all of my twelve years alive. I had never held hands or gone on a date. Hell, I had never had a crush on a single one of my female classmates. When I thought about my future, I never thought about a wife or girlfriend. I had known, even back then, that there was something wrong with me. Weren't boys my age supposed to at least start to be interested in girls? At the very least, if a girl as pretty as Relena, never mind our history with each other, had told me that she liked me, wasn't I supposed to feel flattered? But I didn't. I just felt weird, like it wasn't something that interested me and instead made me feel nervous, and it actually had nothing to do with her bullying me. I had always felt more comfortable about Quatre and my other male classmates than I did girls. I had just chalked it up to the whole boys versus girls, cooties, girls are icky mentality that most boys go through, but until that moment, girls hadn't felt icky to me.

Relena's lips on mine... they felt wrong. They made my stomach churn for some reason. A part of me was freaked out because of who she was, but most of me was freaked out because of what she was. I didn't like it. Every second her soft skin was against mine, I felt like my skin was tingling, and not in a good way. I wanted to shove her away and run. I wanted to be anywhere but there at that moment. But I didn't move away until she did, like I was frozen in place.

When she did move away, without even thinking about it, I grimaced and wiped at my lips. I knew the second that I did it what a huge mistake I had just made, but I couldn't help myself. That grimace had been as reflexive as a flinch if she had hit me. She looked at me again, her expression so full of hope and something that I couldn't place because I had never seen it before. Then she saw my disgust and that expression, which had been so soft and natural on her face, so welcome in comparison to how she usually looked, fell away and little by little, twisted into hate. It was an ugly thing to watch. I had thought the way she had looked at me all the time up until now had been hate, but those looks hadn't held a candle to this. It was loathing and worse, it was hurt. I had hurt her in that moment, a kind of hurt that was worse than anything she had ever done to me. When I saw tears in those hard blue eyes, I felt sick. What had I just done?

The sound of her hand hitting my face in a powerful slap was like a clap of lightning in the noisy hallway. I heard the noise around me go silent, but wasn't sure if it was in my head or if everyone around us was finally taking notice of us. Burning pain filled the right side of my face and I tasted blood, but I was used to both of those things. I wasn't used to the painful rage that was on Relena's face as tears dripped down her cheeks.

"Faggot," she hissed viciously at me with all of the anger of a viper before running off down the hall.

I caught sight of her best friend, Dorothy Catalonia, throwing an arm around her shoulders and comforting her, shooting me a heated glare. I ignored them both and the people around me that were staring like I was the most interesting thing they had seen in their entire lives.

I lightly touched my red hot cheek and looked down at my palm where a small amount of blood was smeared across my skin. One of her nails had caught me when she had slapped me and it had cut my cheek a little. The force of the blow had also split my lip. My dad had hit me in the face enough times that I was well used to the taste of blood and a pain much worse than what Relena's slap had done. But I wasn't used to how it had made me feel. I had never made her angry enough to actually strike me. I had never made anyone cry like that before... I had never hurt anyone like that before.

I should have felt smug about it, triumphant. How many times had she made Quatre or me cry? Who knew if she had done it to other kids. She was mean and cruel, and didn't care about anyone's feelings but her own. She had almost drowned me my first day of school. I should be happy that I had hurt her for once, if not for me then for Quatre. But I wasn't. I was miserable. I didn't want to be like her anymore than I wanted to be like my father.

I wiped the blood from my cheek and lips and hurried to my math class. My teacher lectured me on how tardy I was, which was very, and on any other day I would have been incredibly embarrassed. On that day, I couldn't have cared less. His voice washed over me like white noise as I walked past him and sat down at my desk. I was thoroughly useless the rest of that period. I kept going through what had just happened. It was just so crazy. It had happened to me personally, but I was still having trouble believing it. How could Relena Dorlian like me of all people? Broke, dirty, stupid me? Had she liked me all the way back in the fourth grade and that was the reason why she had bullied me? I still didn't get it. Did girls really do stuff like that? I just couldn't believe that. Or had she just realized she liked me afterwards?

I replayed the entire thing in my head, her kiss, my reaction, her reaction to my reaction. Was there something I should have done differently? What were you supposed to do when a girl told you she liked you and kissed you? I could still feel her lips against mine, and I could still feel my complete disinterest and discomfort. Was there something wrong with me? I had never even thought about kissing girls. Was that normal? Obviously it wasn't, I told myself. How could I say that I was just too young, it was too soon, and that I would just grow into my attraction when a girl the same age as me had been interested in kissing me?

Faggot. She had called me that when she had seen my repulsion. I knew what that word meant. Faggots were boys that didn't like girls like they were supposed to. They were screwed up, freaks, and they liked kissing boys instead. I had always known that I was a freak, different from so many of my classmates, but was I... was I really a faggot? At that moment I had been self-aware enough to know that that was an impossible question for a twelve year old. It was probably an impossible question even if I had been older. What the hell did I know about sexuality, let alone my own? Sex hadn't even been on my mental radar, just one of those things I knew about, but had just labeled it as 'I'll worry about that when I'm older.'

But even if that was the case, I realized that my disinterest in all girls was unusual. I had seen boys in my grade holding hands with girls. I'm sure sex hadn't been on their minds, either, but romance, dating, liking had. Those thoughts had to have entered their heads. And if a girl had kissed them, especially a pretty girl like Relena, I'm sure that they would consider themselves lucky. I'm sure that none of them would have felt repulsed. Did that really mean I was a faggot?

I didn't even know what I was supposed to do if I was. It wasn't like I wanted to hold hands with any of the boys I knew either. I couldn't even begin to fathom what it would mean for me, well aware how my father, classmates, and most of the other people in my life felt about 'those' people. I was already a freak, did it matter that I was even more of one?

Eventually math period ended and I was even more confused than I had been at the start of it. I don't really remember being scared or repulsed by the possibility that Relena had been right, just very puzzled and worried. I filed it away in my head as something to worry about at some other point in my life, some point where it actually became a problem. I had other things to worry about.

I waited until all my other classmates had left to shoulder my backpack and leave the room. Zechs Dorlian was waiting for me, just like I knew he would be. He was leaning up against the lockers, arms crossed over his chest, his blue eyes glaring at me. He was wearing ripped blue jeans, the kind you could buy that way that probably cost just shy of a hundred dollars, black boots, and a very dark cranberry colored t-shirt with the name of some band on it, his long silver hair in a ponytail that was longer than mine.

I needed a hair cut, but I didn't have the money to get one or the skills to do it myself without the possibility of screwing up. My parents hadn't noticed how long my hair was getting either, and I wasn't going to bring the subject up with them, so I had just put it in a high ponytail and forgot about it.

Zechs was tall even for his age, more lanky than muscular but with a definite power in his arms. He used to be on the school boxing team before he had beat one of his teammates bloody during a boxing match. He scared the hell out of me, always had, and that had been before I had hurt his sister. Before, when I had just been 'Quatre's dorky friend,' he had looked at me like I was nothing more than an insect on his windshield, easily ignored and of no significance to him.

Now he looked at me like a wolf would at a terrified rabbit, his stare intense, angry and excited at the same time. Just like a scared rabbit, I could feel myself shake. He walked towards me and every instinct I had screamed at me to run, reminding me of everything this boy had done to my friend and Quatre hadn't pissed him off like I had. But I was paralyzed with terror. The only other person who had ever made me feel so tiny and scared was my father.

'He's going to disembowel me,' I remember thinking.

Not in the way that kids exaggerate an especially bad beating, I remember actually being overwhelmed with this terror and paranoid thought that the teenager was gong to rip my guts out.

"So," he said in this almost bored drawl, "you're the piece of shit that made my little sister cry," my stomach plummeted to my knees as he stood in front of me, his tone icy cold, "and here I was, being a nice guy and leaving the kid she liked alone. And this is how you repay me?"

He sighed, like just speaking to me was nothing more than a chore to him. Suddenly, with the lightning fast speed of a cat, he clutched my right ear and twisted. I cried out in pain, unable to do anything else, my backpack falling from my shoulder.

"Do you think my sister's pretty, Duo?" Zechs asked with a sort of banal innocence, like he wasn't causing me an excruciating amount of pain.

I tried to nod, but it hurt too much.

"Y-yes," I stammered.

His predatory grin widened, pleased with that answer.

"Do you think a lowly, useless piece of filth like you is too good for her?"

"No," I gasped out and almost cried with relief when he let go of my ear, letting me slump to my knees on the floor.

That relief turned to shock and pain as he drove his fist into my stomach. I don't know if I had bitten my tongue or if his punch had damaged something, but I was suddenly gasping for breath and hacking up blood. He didn't let me rest for more than a second, grasping my ponytail and pulling it upwards, nearly lifting me off my feet and worried he was going to pull my scalp off. I felt blood trickle down the side of my face as he twisted my hair and his grip tightened.

"Now, what sort of boy would be so repulsed by the kiss of a pretty girl like my sister?" he taunted, "What are you, a faggot?"

That word again, I was really starting to hate it and the superior look Zechs had when he said it. Before his blue eyes had been hard chips of ice, but as soon as he had started hurting me, they had lit up with perverse pleasure, which I found much more frightening. He gave my head a painful shake by my hair and I realized he wanted an answer.

"I don't know," I managed to say through bloody lips.

I thought about lying and telling him no, I wasn't a faggot, but I didn't know if he would believe that and what he would do if he thought I was lying.

" 'I don't know'," he repeated mockingly, "then why didn't you tell her that you liked her back?" he snarled, shaking me again, but I realized he wasn't really angry.

He was enjoying this.

"Because I don't!" I said truthfully.

At that point, I didn't think I was capable of lying convincingly.

"You don't like her," he sneered, "and what exactly are you going to do about it?"

I could feel the blood dripping down my face, staining my shirt. My ear and stomach throbbed harshly as I dangled there in his grip.

"I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry!" I cried, almost screaming.

"Good boy," he congratulated, "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

He slammed the side of my head into a locker and dropped me like so much dead weight. My world erupted into nothing more than gut wrenching pain and the metallic ringing of my head meeting the locker door. But through all of it I heard the brute speak again.

"I'm going to make your life a living hell."
　

End Part 1
Author's note: I'm hoping to have the entirety of this chapter finished by this weekend, but we'll see. I've already started the next part. Thanks to everyone who has favorited/watched/reviewed this story.
Also want to mention that this story is dedicated to my cousin and everyone else who has ever been bullied, including by their parents. My cousin was the smallest and youngest among 18 older brothers and was physically and emotionally abused by most of his brothers and his father. I started to write this story in the ninth grade to kind of purge all my darker memories of our childhood, watching him struggle with it. Fortunately, thanks to his best friend's mother, he was able to get away from that situation, but not all victims of bullying are that lucky.
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A Stagnation of Love (rewrite)