I wonder sometimes about the things we’ve forgotten.

What’s your first memory? Odds are good that it’s something traumatic, or something very special. Given what the five of us are, I suspect that most of our first memories are of the traumatic variety. My earliest remembrance is of catching my hand in the hammer of a single-action Ruger. I remember distinctly that it had Rosewood grips because I can recall the look of my blood dripping on them. Odin was a good one for letting me learn from my mistakes. It was a lesson that stuck.

But I wonder about the things before that. I had to have been four or five by then. I had a life before that, and I often wonder about the things I’ve forgotten.

Because I think those things shaped us, even though we don’t know what they were.

So I watch sometimes, and I wonder.

We come together as a group fairly often. I think we all crave the contact of people who can understand what makes us tick. What makes us uneasy. What makes us comfortable. We can read each other most of the time. And we naturally just gravitate to each other.

The anniversary of the end of the second war has somehow become tangled up with the holiday season and become something of ‘an occasion’. We usually end up coming to stay with Quatre simply because he can most easily accommodate us as we celebrate together.

It’s generally a quiet affair, and I rather look forward to it, since we usually spend several days together. I like the calm camaraderie. The solid acceptance. The genuine happiness that we each hold at seeing each other.

My job as a network security consultant allows me far more flexibility than the others, and I am more often than not the first to arrive at these gatherings. It lets me be available to play host with Quatre, something else I enjoy because I get to share the full force of the new arrivals greetings. There is something… tempered about us, once we’ve settled in. But being at the front door when they first arrive is almost guaranteed to result in back-slapping from Wufei, poking and teasing from Trowa, and best of all… a full, crushing hug from Duo.

No… not something I was going to miss when all it would cost me was an early arrival.

Duo was the first to arrive after me and he did not disappoint, dropping his bags and whooping delightedly as he caught Quatre up and spun him around until he got his braid jerked for his trouble. Laughing, he turned to me next and while he couldn’t lift me, I was exuberantly embraced anyway. I was tempted to lift him from his feet, but it would have been a bit much, so I satisfied myself with simply returning the hug.

Duo… shines. There’s just no other way to put it. He has to be the warmest, most out-going person I’ve ever met. Quatre can be charming, and certainly knows his way around his social circles, but Duo is the type that can go anywhere, with anyone and be right at home. From the sleaziest back street diners to one of the Preventers’ fund raising balls… he just shines.

‘Duo,’ Quatre said when he had Duo’s attention again. ‘You look great!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Duo laughed. ‘I’m just coming off a two week stint of sixteen hour shifts… I look like road kill, and you know it.’

‘I was being polite,’ Quatre said, side-stepping actually having to agree or disagree. I personally didn’t; while Duo looked a bit tired, he didn’t look the least bit like road kill. But I think I understood the feeling. ‘But if you think you look so bad, why don’t you go on up to your room and freshen up. You’re in the same room as last time.’

I was looking at Duo and was surprised to see a bit of that shine go out of his eyes. ‘Aw, Quat!’ he complained, making his voice that of a petulant little boy. ‘The same room? That’s boring! I was hoping for something different this year… maybe with a hot tub?’

Quatre chuckled lightly as he turned away. ‘I don’t have any rooms with hot tubs,’ he informed Duo. ‘Well… except for mine, and you’re not sleeping with me.’

‘Oh, what a damn injustice!’ Duo wailed with mock hurt. ‘I don’t suppose you’re at least planning a tub party?’

Quatre almost choked, and turned back from the doorway. ‘Not on your life, Duo Maxwell. Besides… it’s a single.’ He was gone before Duo could formulate a decent reply.

I bent and picked up his duffle bag and one of his suit cases and gave him a rather stiff little bow. ‘Shall I show you to your room?’

It surprised a grin out of him and he bowed in return taking up the remaining bag. ‘Well the service is better than the last time I was here, at least.’

His room was not that far from mine and I led him to it, not because he needed me to, but because I just wanted some more time in his company. And I wanted to understand his odd reaction to Quatre’s room choices. Because there had very definitely been a reaction.
I went in first and dropped his bags on the bed, turning to watch him as he followed me. There was a strange… tension in him that hadn’t been there before.

The room was like most of the guest rooms in Quatre’s house, slightly less than opulent, but far from Spartan or impersonal. Duo’s room was decorated in a soothing green theme with a full size bed, a comfortable sitting area and a private bath. Very much like my own room.

Duo, however, did not seem to be soothed.

I watched him as he moved about, looking for clues to his discomfort there. It seemed odd; it was just a room after all.

He took off his jacket, draping it across the back of one of the overstuffed chairs, and loosened his tie with a sigh of relief.

‘Wouldn’t have joined the damn Preventers if they’d told me about the dress code first,’ he grinned.

I snorted, knowing damn well he’d have joined even if the uniforms had been lace and lycra; it was just that important to him.

‘So how’s the life of geekdom been lately?’ he asked, deciding to take the tie loosening one step farther and remove it all together, smoothing it and laying it with the jacket.

‘Nice and boring,’ I told him. ‘Just the way I like it.’

We shared a grin and I continued to watch him as he moved about the room. There was a clue in his movements, but I hadn’t caught the pattern of it yet.

‘Think you’ll ever get tired of it and come back to the fold?’ he said, a question I’d heard from him every time I’d seen him since the day I’d quit and walked away from it all.

‘Nope,’ I replied. ‘Think you’ll ever get tired of it and come join my company?’ The same reply he got every time he asked.

‘Nope,’ he said amiably, following the ritual, though I thought I caught a hint of hesitation. Maybe he really was just that tired.

I perched on the edge of his bed as he unbuttoned his uniform dress shirt and took it off, leaving just the dress pants and his undershirt. It was an oddly attractive combination. ‘Want me to help you unpack?’ I asked and he gave me a wry grin.

‘Nah. I didn’t bring that much,’ he said, waving the notion away. ‘Easier to just live out of the duffle bag for a couple of days.’

‘Move fast and travel light?’ I asked, quoting back to him something he’d said to me once a long time ago, but at the same time I had to give his multiple bags a pointed glance. He just grinned.

‘Some of that is projects,’ he informed me. ‘We tend to spend a lot of time just sitting around… I thought I could get some work done.’

‘Duo, ‘I chided. ‘This is supposed to be a vacation… Quatre will kill you if you brought case files to one of his weekends away.’

He chuckled and just shook his head. ‘Not that kind of work, Yuy. Don’t worry; I wouldn’t risk the legendary Winner wrath.’

I was dubious, but didn’t push it. ‘I would hope you wouldn’t force Quatre to mar the holidays with bloodshed.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he confirmed with a wide grin and he took the duffle to set on the bench at the foot of the bed. He turned oddly as he moved and I watched intently, almost seeing it, but not quite sure yet. ‘If you want to hang on a minute while I go to the bathroom, we can go back down and see if we can hunt up some lunch.’

‘That sounds good,’ I agreed and waited for him to leave the room before getting up to test a theory.

Ever seen a kid when they first discover how two magnets will repel each other? And seen them spend hours trying to force them to line up? Used the one to push the other around?

Watching Duo move around his guest room had been reminiscent. There was something there that he was avoiding. Something he didn’t want to look at. Something that made his eyes avoid a portion of the room. Made his body avoid turning that way. Made his smile and his laughter just a little less bright.

I walked over to the room’s dresser and looked long and hard at the picture that hung above it. A simple wildlife print of ducks on the water. There was a mother duck, followed by three little yellow fluff-balls, swimming across a pond. But the subject of the painting was the fourth little duckling, somehow separated from the others and unable to traverse a fallen log to catch up. It was meant, I suspect, to be a whimsical thing. The duck had only to move a couple of feet to one side or the other to go around, but didn’t seem to understand that.

And that’s where I was standing when Duo came out of the bathroom. I watched him closely, though I was careful not to let it show. It was very odd; I don’t honestly think he realized he was doing it, but I was suddenly in his ‘magnet zone’.

‘Ready to go?’ he asked, voice as cheerful as it had been, though his eyes slid over me as though I were a source of bright light he didn’t want to look directly at.
‘Sure,’ I agreed and followed him out of the room.

Sometimes answers just lead to more questions.

Trowa arrived next, bearing gifts from his sister plus a box full of enough cookies to feed the Magacnac Corp for months. The woman seemed to be under the impression that pilots, ex or otherwise, were incapable of feeding themselves. I wondered sometimes if it was an impression that Trowa fostered in order to give her something to do… she had to have been baking for a week.

Wufei, as usual, arrived last. Like Duo, still in uniform and looking just as frazzled and sleep deprived. We listened to tales of budget cuts and extended hours over one of Quatre’s carefully prepared lunches. Until our host put the usual kibosh on all talk of work, business, politics and anything else he deemed stressful.

We would relax and unwind, by God, or he would know the reason why.

‘… and then that asshole Garrison had to go and report the whole incident because ‘Molotov cocktails are not Preventer issue equipment’! Didn’t matter that we were completely pinned down and running out of ammo! The guy is just…’

‘First hour rule, Duo,’ Quatre cut in, grinning when Duo huffed at him.

‘Come on, man!’ Duo whined theatrically. ‘It hasn’t been an hour yet! I thought we were allowed to catch each other up before your censoring kicked in!’

Quatre just rolled his eyes at him. ‘Not an hour yet, but you and Wufei have completely dominated the conversation and we haven’t gotten to hear anything about what’s going on with Heero or Trowa yet.’

‘Not our fault we have more interesting stories,’ Wufei quipped, reaching across the table for something, his focus on the bowl only partially hiding the smirk.

‘I thought the lion escaping during the show last week and eating three spectators was kind of interesting,’ Trowa offered, managing to make it sound morose, as though disappointed that his lion story was being ignored.

‘What?!’ Duo and Quatre both exclaimed, almost in chorus, and Trowa couldn’t contain the laugh.

‘Well, it would have been interesting… had it actually happened,’ he grinned and Duo wadded up his napkin to throw across the table at him. Being made out of cloth, it didn’t make it, just unfurling and fluttering to the table, barely missing Quatre’s water glass.

‘Children,’ Quatre admonished sternly, and Duo ducked his head.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ he grinned, tone sheepish, but expression… not so much.

‘So what you have been up to, Yuy?’ Wufei asked me, choosing to ignore the display. ‘Being the one we haven’t heard from yet.’

‘Is there time left in the hour?’ I asked and Duo’s napkin came winging my way, though Quatre’s aim was better and it hit me in the chest. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any lions or Garrisons on my job, so my stories are pretty boring.’

‘Things wouldn’t be so dull if you’d come back to work,’ Duo jibed. ‘Une keeps your office like a shrine… you could move right back in.’

I snorted at him and rolled my eyes, I knew damn well he’d taken over my office himself before the chair had gotten cold. Mine had had a window and his had not. ‘Dull is in the eye of the beholder,’ I teased back, returning his napkin to him in a wadded up ball. ‘At least my days are just eight hours long.’

‘He’s got a point there, Maxwell,’ Wufei admitted, and they shared a look that was somewhere between commiseration and congratulations.

While my job no longer involves things like Molotov cocktails or even side arms, I managed to come up with an amusing story about my last security audit, and network passwords based on people’s pet’s names.

Then it was Trowa’s turn and while there had been no big cat escapades, we got to hear about the new act he was working on with Catherine, before he deftly turned the talk to updates on his sister’s love life and eased us out of that ‘first hour’.

Then it was talk of sisters and friends and pets. The last movie seen, the latest restaurant visited, plans for trips, the cool new car unveiled for the new season. It takes a bit of effort to edit out the ‘forbidden’ topics at first, but feeling the tension fade from the room over the next few hours, makes me understand Quatre’s rules perfectly.

It’s especially obvious with Wufei and Duo, who can wind themselves up to a fever pitch over job frustrations, but I find that I’m more than happy to set aside my own problems for a few days.

Lunch was a thing that lasted hours; while Quatre can be the consummate host, he usually allows us the better part of the first day before his scheduled ‘events’ start taking place. I had no doubt that the morrow would bring excursions on horse-back and local site-seeing trips, but he understood that we needed time to change gears first.

We sat over our drinks and desserts and talked until someone commented that a couch would be more comfortable than dining room chairs, and we relocated to what Wufei jokingly called Quatre’s ‘man cave’. It was a room you could tell was off limits to the staff, where Quatre could retreat when he was tired of being the Winner heir and ‘master’ to the resident loyal army. The furniture was plush and deep, the electronics of the highest quality, and not a newspaper or filing cabinet in sight. Though I did notice a handheld gaming device on the coffee table. It was obviously not a place for work or politics. It suited us just fine.

After a bit more catching up, things degenerated into trying to make Quatre name all of his nieces and nephews and we knew he was just making things up when he went from Ayisha and Hanan to Bob and Tom. That was when the catching up was set aside and an appropriately mindless action movie was voted on. I wasn’t familiar with the title, but Duo was particularly gleeful over the special effects, and Wufei endorsed the… attributes of the two main characters. The female lead was the typical Hollywood action heroine… kick-ass as long as her body-double made her so, and her counterpart was the standard hard-bodied action hero. Chiseled physique that probably never left the gym when he wasn’t on the set.

Something for everyone, I believe, was the comment.

Quatre went for fresh drinks while Trowa and Duo excused themselves for bathroom breaks, and Wufei and I figured out the electronics.

I’m afraid we all did a double-take when Duo came back and settled in to the corner of the couch next to a lamp with… a bag of yarn.

There was one of those strange moments where, I believe the phrase is… crickets chirped.

Wufei was the one to finally voice our… surprise. ‘Maxwell, what the fuck is that?’

Duo, shoes discarded and legs curled under him, pulled out a hook and a length of yarn, and blandly replied, ‘my crocheting.’

Trowa was unable to stifle a snort of a laugh. ‘Your… what?’

‘Crocheting,’ Duo repeated, not bothering to look up at him as he set to work, hook flashing and catching yarn and making… loops. He wasn’t even blushing, and it made me wonder just how long he’d had this hobby that he was already immune to the teasing.

Wufei, evil glint in his eye, was just opening his mouth to really start in, when Quatre moved around the coffee table to perch on the couch next to Duo. Probably in an effort to forestall the verbal abuse.

‘Uh… what are you making?’ he asked gamely, and poked around in the sack of yarn until he came out with what appeared to be a hat for a growth challenged munchkin.

It sidetracked Wufei into a full blown laugh. ‘What the hell is that? A baseball cover?’

Duo’s hook paused for a moment and he glanced at Wufei with his searing look… the one that usually reduces suspects to nervous sweating. It at least toned Wufei down to bemused confusion. ‘It’s a hat for a premie. I’m making them for the local chapter of Newborns in Need.’

‘Premature babies?’ Quatre asked, looking closer at the tiny, colorful thing in his hands. ‘That’s… uh… nice?’

‘That’s just so…’ Trowa began, grinning widely but not able to come up with an appropriate adjective.

‘Gay?’ Wufei supplied with a snicker and the two of them fell all over each other laughing.

Duo rolled his eyes, and went back to work. ‘Well, it’s appropriate then, for this crowd.’

Quatre just snorted and dug deeper in the bag, pulling out more hats. There were a good deal of them. ‘Well, they’re right Duo… couldn’t you have taken up something more…’

‘Manly?’ Trowa supplied, perhaps making up for his own adjective lack.

Duo forewent the eye rolling but paused for the second it took to flip him off, though the effect was kind of spoiled by the yarn wrapped around his finger. ‘I’ll have you know I was making wooden toys for the toy drive at work, but I had to switch off to this when I started developing tendonitis from the sanding.’

Trowa seemed to give it up then, perhaps understanding that you kind of looked like an ass mocking children’s charities, and threw himself down in the armchair. ‘Well put it up so we can turn out the lights for the movie… it’s not the same if we don’t turn out the lights.’

‘What?’ Duo said, blinking at him in surprise. ‘Come on guys… I have a hundred of these things to make by the end of the week, and I’m only just over half way!’

Wufei sided with Trowa, taking his drink and bowl of popcorn to sprawl out across the short couch, leaving the long one for Duo, Quatre and myself. ‘Guess you should stop committing to so damn much, Maxwell,’ he teased.

‘I’ve got plenty of time to get the work done,’ Duo groused. ‘If you guys would just bend a little. This isn’t high theatre… it’s an action flick.’

‘If it was high theatre,’ Trowa dead-panned, ‘we wouldn’t be watching it. Now come on already… it’s tradition.’

Duo glared at him and was just opening his mouth to retort, when I saw his mistake the same time Quatre caught the wording. ‘It’s work, Duo… you said so yourself. And we’re supposed to be on vacation.’

‘Oh for…’ Duo began, and I’m not sure anybody else caught it, but there was a flash of true temper in his eyes. He shut it down instantly, biting off whatever he had been going to say, and just sat his bag aside with a theatrically exasperated sigh.

Quatre beamed at him, the lights were turned off, and we proceeded to spend the next two hours chortling at improbable stunts and ridiculous heroics.

I think I was the only one who noticed that Duo wasn’t nearly as animated as he normally would have been. Or maybe the others just chalked it up to those sixteen hour days catching up to him.

I could only assume he was busy calculating just how much work he could have gotten done during those hours instead of enjoying the film. Personally, I didn’t see the harm, but he’d pretty much hung himself when he’d slipped and referred to it as ‘work’.

Quatre is rather like a pit-bull when it comes to his ‘rules’.

While it was fairly late by the time the credits rolled, it wasn’t all that late, but Duo was the first to suggest turning in. I wondered about it, he’s something of a night-owl, but Wufei was quick to agree, so maybe they really were just that tired. I chose to support the idea and since majority rules… off we all trooped to our rooms. Though I suspected not everyone was headed off to bed.

I gave it an hour before I went back down, and sure enough, found Duo curled up in the corner of the couch again, television silently running some cheesy Christmas special, and yarn in his lap.

I settled down beside him, picking up one of the tiny hats and looking it over.

‘Not gonna tell on me, are you?’ he asked with the quirk of a grin.

‘Maybe I should,’ I snorted. ‘You made so many toys you gave yourself tendonitis? How many toys does it take to actually do that?’

‘Couple hundred,’ he said, and I’m not sure if I imagined the hint of pride in his voice. I watched the hook move in his hand.

‘Isn’t that just more repetitive motion?’

‘Different kind of motion,’ he told me blandly. ‘This gets me in the elbow eventually. That’s why I have several different hobbies… when the one starts bothering my shoulder, I just switch off to the other…’

‘And switch back when the elbow starts to hurt?’ I had to ask, and he seemed to miss the bit of rebuke. I didn’t bother pointing out that hobbies were supposed to be fun, and it seemed like he’d taken it well past the point of ‘fun’.

I watched him work for a few minutes, he seemed to be just finishing one of the hats off, and when he snipped the thread and tossed the thing into the growing pile in the bag, I stopped him. ‘Got another hook in there?’

He just sat blinking at me for a long moment, before a grin spread across his face that held an impish delight. Like we were two wayward boys flouting ‘Dad’s’ authority together. ‘You know how?’

‘No, but it doesn’t look like rocket science, and since I’ve pretty well mastered that, I think I can follow along.’

He fished another hook out of his bag and handed it over with another bundle of the yarn, shifting around to sit up straighter beside me so that I could see better what he was doing. While it looked complicated on the surface, taken one stitch at a time, it really was simplicity itself… much like dancing, Duo led and I followed and after a couple of false starts, I was working alongside him, and the pile of tiny hats was growing. Maybe not quite at twice the speed, I was only a beginner after all, but faster than Duo alone.

Once I had the rhythm of it down, he gave me a smile that was more warmth than mischief and said, ‘Thanks man…I wasn’t sure I was going to make it if Quatre wasn’t going to let me work in front of him.’

‘Should have called it a hobby,’ I chided and got a sheepish little duck of his head.

‘Yeah,’ he confessed. ‘I could have kicked myself when I realized what I’d said. I saw it on Quatre’s face the minute it sank in.’ He sighed and just shook his head.

‘Well,’ I ventured. ‘It does seem like a lot of work…’ I let it trail off, to see which way he’d take it.

‘But I promised!’ he said, defensiveness rising in his voice. ‘They need the help and it’s not like I’m doing anything else.’

I let the quiet run for a minute then asked, ‘So… you got involved before your hours went to hell at work?’

He was focused on pulling a knot out of his yarn, but replied distractedly, ‘No, I was looking for something to fill in with when my shoulder got so bad the doc said I had to lay off the wood-working. One of the payroll clerks was telling me about it.’

‘I didn’t even know you knew how to crochet,’ I snorted and wasn’t all that surprised when he replied,

‘She had to teach me.’

Knot vanquished, he went back to work and I watched his nimble fingers fly for a minute before I bent back to my own work. It was an odd combination of soothing and stressful. I could see where the hobby, as an actual hobby, could probably be fairly therapeutic. But having that dead-line hanging over us just made me feel the pressure to produce as fast as possible. It was no wonder Duo had been so subdued during the movie, I imagine he was counting every minute lost.

When I didn’t reply, he gave me another one of those warm little smiles and had to tell me again, ‘I really appreciate this.’

‘No big deal,’ I assured him. ‘Not like my job keeps me all sleep-deprived. I’m good to go.’

He snorted, the smile trying to grow into a smirk. ‘You saying you can outlast me?’

‘I don’t think it matters, we’ll need to stop before Quatre comes down in the morning anyway, or we’re dead meat.’

He laughed out loud, but then stifled it with a guilty glance toward the door, despite the fact that the house was huge enough that we would really have to yell to disturb anybody. ‘You’ve got a point,’ he acquiesced.

We worked in silence for a bit then, Duo curling back into the corner of the couch once he didn’t need to show me what to do anymore. My speed improved, as did my form, and I reflected that my first few hats should probably be discarded if we ended up not needing them.

When he broke the quiet next, he talked a little bit about his work, and I talked a little bit about mine, without our mother hen there to smack our figurative hands for breaking the rules. He didn’t let himself dwell on the aggravating bits though, and I found the time passing almost more quickly than I would have liked. It was a… companionable time. I found myself listening to his stories of heroics… real heroics, that had become so commonplace they were mundane, and thinking about forgotten things.

I remembered Duo saying once that he’d fought during the war so others wouldn’t have to, and I wondered about the things that had shaped him. Wondered about his past and without really meaning to, I heard myself ask, ‘What’s your earliest memory?’

His hook stopped moving and I could feel him staring at me, so I glanced up from my work. ‘I know that’s kind of out of the blue, but I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately.’

‘What’s yours?’ he blurted, and I wondered if he was just buying time, or maybe just gauging the level of… honesty we were talking about. So I told him, and when I was done I found myself looking at my hand where the scar was so faded I couldn’t even really find it. I shook my head and went back to work, letting him decide if he wanted to respond or not.

He was quiet for a bit, his hook beginning to move again, and I could see the flash of his fingers out of the corner of my eye.

‘Nothin’ much,’ he finally replied, though his tone had softened in such a way that it belied his casual words. ‘Not a whole memory, really. Just… a flash. A man’s hand holding mine. Only… slipping? I can remember grabbing for it, but I… can’t quite make sense of it.’

I looked across at him where he studiously didn’t look at me, and nodded knowing he could see. ‘I know,’ I told him, understanding without knowing. My first memory might be quite solid, but there were others that are more… frayed around the edges. Sometimes a memory is just a feeling, or a scent, or… a touch that’s lost.

I studied him for a moment, and decided to let the subject drop. There is nothing quite as frustrating as having a puzzle you know can’t truly be solved. Questions that the answers to are long and truly gone.

Sometimes you have to accept that there is no real understanding of what brought you to a moment, there is only the moment.

False dawn was tinting the sky outside the lone window in Quatre’s hideaway room when we finally stopped, and I helped Duo count up the pile of hats spilling out of his bag. ‘Ninty-five!’ he crowed with a wide grin, the melancholy I’d caused, hours behind him and seemingly banished. ‘I can finish the last few in the evenings before bed, easy! Thanks, man!’

‘No problem,’ I told him again, as we stuffed hats, yarn and hooks into the bag, preparing to slip away before our nocturnal ventures were caught out by our host.

We stood and as he hooked the too full bag over his shoulder, one of the hats fell back onto the couch. I retrieved it, but didn’t hand it back immediately, holding it and holding his attention with it.

‘You know, Duo,’ I said, turning the hat in my fingers and feeling my way through my wording. ‘If we ever had… debts in our lives, I think we’ve repaid them a hundred fold.’ I held the hat out and when he reached for it, I took his hand instead, holding it tight, wondering how close I came to mimicking a memory. ‘It’s ok sometimes to move on.’

There were a lot of things dancing in his eyes then, sparks of so many emotions I couldn’t have named them, but I didn’t see any confusion. He understood me just fine. I tugged on his hand then and led him up the stairs, his thoughts running fast and furious, only communicated to me through the unconscious, bruising clutch of his hand.

We stopped in front of his door and I let him go with a final hard squeeze. ‘You can’t slip away again,’ I told him. ‘You have too many people watching out for you.’

It made him smile in a broken sort of way, and I turned away before he tried to articulate something he wasn’t quite ready to.

‘Merry Christmas, Heero,’ he called softly, just as I opened my door and I turned to smile back at him, finding the look in his eyes contemplative and warm, and just a little bit lost in memory.

‘Merry Christmas, Duo,’ I replied and waited while he went into his room and shut the door quietly behind him.

I thought about ducks and rosewood. I thought about slipping and being left behind. I thought about the cost on the future that the past can make.

‘Good night,’ I whispered to the empty hall and went to catch what sleep I could before the new day started. I wasn’t sure what plans Quatre might have for us, but I meant to see that Duo enjoyed them. It was time he stopped paying backward a debt he never really owed.

 

 

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