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In Sickness	By : muteandtremorless Category: Gundam Wing/AC > General Views: 655 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing/AC, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Title: In Sickness

Summary: AU, hinted at 3+4 & 4+3, A Dying man's caretaker is forced to run his estate for two years, but things are changing.

Disclaimer: I don't own characters.

Other: If you read this please comment on it. I feel that this is one of the worst stories I've ever written and would really like to know if others feel that way. This is a continuing story so there will be a few more chapters.

Inspiration: What really got the poetry flowing for this was the movie Titus, taken from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare's work really was not meant to be read, but to be performed. The plot of this story does not resemble that of Titus Andronicus in anyway, the passion and suffering in Shakespeare's words helped me get back to my own. And from there a wealth of words bubbled fourth.

In Sickness

Quatre shifted restlessly; sheets clung to his naked body like children to a mother. A pitiful sound escaped his lips as he tossed his head to the side, it spun �round circular and painful. The heat hung about his body like a low fog, pressing tenderly against him one moment before smothering him the next. Inside himself he wanted to run from the unbearable heat and aches of his body.

And then�

A cool cloth lay itself on his foad. ad. It gently wiped the sweat from his cheeks and carefully drew the heat from his exposed arms and chest. Through pain squinted eyes and thin eyelashes he could see Trowa and he smiled slightly with relief.

But the heat came again blowing through his body as harshly as wind through a ravine, tearing him apart. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. Trowa lifted him out of the bed, took him into the bathroom and set him down in the tub. Quatre�s arms, legs, and torso began to twitch at odd angles. Trowa turned on the water, since a fire hadn�t been lit in the kitchen there was no hot water and liquid as cold as ice poured out of the faucet. Trowa held Quatre�s shoulders against the side of the tub to keep him from slipping as it filled.

Several minutes passed and Quatre ceased to seize. His body did not remain quiet for long though, it began to spasm with a fit of violent coughing. Blood exploded out of his mouth, hit the water, and spiraled downward in distillation. Though it had happened numerous timesore ore the blood always scared him. Seeing it forced him to realize how sick he was. He shut his eyes and immediately a hand went to his mouth and another to his chest as if to silence his body of its illness, to suck the blood backwards, and away, to force this illness, that was his life in all it�s pain, to merely disappear. If blood could smile it would have smiled maliciously at him as it continued to leak through the cracks of his hand. When his body ceased it�s coughing Trowa lifted him out of the tub and pulled the stopper. He wrapped Quatre in a warm towel and set him down in a chair in the bedroom. Quickly he pulled the sheets off the bed and placed on new ones and turned back towards Quatre.

His pale body leaned against the chair, his head stared down disinterested in the deep blue of the carpet. Two dull gray marbles that once gleamed a mild blue with joy now held nothing. Only in the corners could emotions be sought; they were not of hope and beauty but of pain, fear, and despair. His mouth lay open giving him a broken look, as if his body no longer knew how to shut the jaw. Trowa lifted him up and placed him into the bed, he wrapped the sheets around his thinning body and stepped back. Quatre would soon be all bones, and pointy skin. His cheeks had that diseased sunken look, all his features too sharp to be healthy. That day he had managed to keep down a bowl of soup, but that was only a pebble of hope lost amongst a forest of stones.

Trowa lifted up the old sheets, the smell of fresh sweat and dampness still lingering he dragged them towards the basement and washroom of the castle.

A seven-candled chandelier was the only light in the murky basement. Drafty shadows clung to the walls in a dusting of spider webs. Trowa scrubbed the sheets against the side of the wooden tub, at first he watched a spider crawl up the wall, but then directed his attention to his own rippling reflection. He watched it break a part and reform with the water�s movements. He watched the old eyes, with the wrinkled corners. He had changed in his two years at the Winner estate. Changed. The word so meaningful that it stuck in the lower part of his throat even when he thought about it. His eyes, they were too different. All his life they had held an emotionlesssness, now that was rotting, festering slightly in the very depths. In the very deep of the cold, cold eyes there was just a small flicker, a momentary gleam, of death � of pain. It moved and faded and danced about his eye as if taunting him. Denying him the realization he needed to define it, to label it, to tie it down with words so that he could soon erase it.

He shook his head of such thoughts and his hands raw from scrubbing and soap, hung the sheets to dry, and headed upstairs.

Trowa tuned his flute as rain battered itself against the castle and lightening kissed the ground. The music high and shrill for tuning bounced down (as far down as flutes can go anyway) to start out with a low and somber tune. Then it danced through an aria as bright and clear as a calm sky. Before plunging to the level of thunder, and then unburdening itself again to finish with a quiet neutral tone.

Quatre alone in the other room, but not deaf to the flute or the storm, quietly shook with tears. He didn�t care, he couldn�t be strong all the time. So he let the tears come, let them fall and wash all of reality away.

Rain, Trowa surmised, after he his his flute in its case and went back into Quatre�s room. Rain and his horse breaking a leg was the reason he had come to the manner two summers ago. Now deep in winter it seemed so far away, so ancient.

When first he arrived Quatre had still been able to walk, and every morning Trowa was greeted with a smile and breakfast. Quatre would watch, leaning against the fence or stable door, as Trowa cared for the injured horse. He would sneak it all sorts of treats too, always carrying a bit of sugar or a carrot, the horse began to recognize and enjoy his company. To Trowa it has always been just a horse, he was just using it for transportation, he hadn�t even named it. To Quatre it was something that should be loved and cared for like a companion. He even named the horse, though now Trowa couldn�t remember what it was. It didn�t matter much anymore, the horse had died, two weeks into his stay, in a stable fire.

Trowa had spenothnother two weeks rebuilding the stable, by that time he�d known there was something wrong with Quatre. A day or two before Trowa was to set out to buy another horse and continue on as a lone mercenary he found Quatre unconscious in his bed. Normally he would have left, walked away and disappeared, but something had kept him there. Something that was as hard to catch as the change in his eyes.

He watched Quatre�s nearly still body, his raspy labored breathing the only thing to break the silence of the room. He stroked a log to make it pop, to rustle both the silence and the breath. Briefly he touched Quatre�s cheek, noting again the severe depletion of fat, the way the skin just sunk into the space of his mouth and clung to the outlines of his teeth. It made him want to shutter, it made him see Quatre as only a body, and not as a soul. He left quickly.

The day drawing to a close Trowa walked through the castle blowing out candles and adding logs to fires. Aches crept into the corners of his bones but he shrugged them off. His hand swung around the marble banister only to be forced to turn around and answer the loud pounding of the castle door.

Three darkly cloaked figures stood in the cold dampness of the doorstep.

To be continued

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In Sickness