Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Extra Tuition ❯ Part Three ( Chapter 3 )

Author: Ryuen Nakashima

Pairings: past 2x4, I'll leave you to find out about the others

Archived: Not yet. None of my fics have a real home yet *sniff*

Setting: Around eight months after Endless Waltz

Rating: R overall

Warnings: yaoi, angst, language, north-eastern English… that's all for now.

Disclaimer: Nothing GW related is mine. This story is. Nuff said.

Extra Tuition - Part Three

"Listen to me, Quatre. As far as anyone else is concerned, the war and your Gundam were mistakes. Your first and only obligation is to your family and your schoolwork. Added to that, you're not gay, you've never had any inclinations that way and you certainly did not sleep around with the other Gundam pilots in the war."

The blond boy sat and gaped at his sister. Suraya had never been the open minded type but he had no idea why she thought she had any right to demand these things of him. "You're not my mother, Suraya!" he argued back. "Even if you were, I couldn't. You cannot expect me to deny who I am and forget the man I'm in love wi-"

"You are not in love with *anyone*!" she screeched. "Now that Iria and father are gone, I'm head of this family. You'll keep up appearances and do what I say or I'll cut you off from all of us. Physically and financially."

Quatre gulped as he weighed the options in front of him. "I can't believe you…" he whispered desperately. "Alright," he said after around a minute's thinking and got slowly to his feet. "Just to set the record straight," Quatre began solemnly. "You can't accuse me of sleeping around. I'm gay, fine, but I'm not some harlot."

"You had sex with two other men at the age of fifteen," his sister stated angrily. "To me, that's sleeping around. Now just get the hell out of here you puny little slut!"

Sitting on his cold dorm bed and milling everything over, he let the tears fall freely from his eyes, sobbing and grieving for his lost humanity. Just the memory of that conversation and the implications it held for the rest of his life were enough to make him cry.

`I didn't want to do that to you, Duo,' Quatre thought to himself. `I love you so much. You were the best friend I've ever had… you taught me everything about life in that year we fought together and I threw that away in just a few hours and for what?' he wondered, frantically searching for what had made him even approach that decision.

`Could I do that again?' he asked. `If another Gundam pilot comes along, can I seriously brush him off that way? What if Trowa shows up…? I wouldn't be able to hold back. Duo was a friend but Trowa… I'm in love with you, Trowa. I tried so hard not to be. I knew this kind of love would cause excruciating pain at some point in either of our lives but I didn't ever think it could come to this.'

He sighed and dried his eyes on his shirt sleeve. `It was hard enough just to watch you walk away when I told you what I needed to do. But at least I hoped I'd see you again when everything was done. I've got so many legal ties to this family. Severing them all myself would take years. I have to have *them* let go of *me* before I'll ever be able to face you.'

Quatre took some more deep breaths and rolled over in his bed to switch off his lamp. He looked about the room grateful only for the fact that he'd paid to room alone. `So money has advantages,' he thought bitterly. `Advantages I wouldn't need if money hadn't got me into this state in the first place.'

Beleaguered with a fitful sleep stuffed with nightmares and sessions of five minutes rest between them, he woke the next morning bleary-eyed and feeling even more ashamed of himself than he had the previous night.

--

Duo groaned as his alarm went off the next morning. That hideous `beep-beep-beep… beep-beep-beep… beep-beep-beep' noise drove him to distraction. Partly the reason he'd once dropped it in water and it now made more of a bwip than a beep.

"Oh fuck, I'm still here," he said, looking up at the ceiling. `I was kinda hoping I'd just die in my sleep. At least I'm using computers today, maybe I'll finally get a break.'

He smiled as he sat down at the console half-way across campus, pulling out another three-tonne textbook and abandoning it to the side of his computer. Today they were designing basic word-processing programs. `Keys, keys, computer keys!' Duo sang in his head, completely elated by the fact that he was completely up to speed and of higher basic intelligence than most students in the class.

`Those two things go together nicely,' he thought as he booted up the PC. A while into the program he paused and checked the main menu. "Ugh…" he said to himself, resigning to flipping open the textbook and getting a little help. `No problem with that once in a while… uh-oh.'

Duo grimaced at the more lengthy words the book was using. With only six months of full literacy - more than half of which was down to Heero's help - he hadn't quite grasped the make-up of longer words. `What's that? Co… con… hoo boy."

He glanced to either side of him. Aubrey on his left, that annoying Persephone girl on his left. `There's no way I'm asking them. I'd never hear the end of it. The teacher! She's here to teach so that's what she'd expect.' He picked up the textbook and swivelled his chair around, jumping as he noticed the Norwegian Miss Johansson already behind him.

"Are you alright there, Duo?" she asked kindly. So far her softly-spoken voice hadn't attracted anyone's attention but his own. "Can I help you with something?"

"Um, yeah," he said quietly. "Could you tell me what this word says?" he asked, pointing to the line in the textbook that was giving him grief.

The teacher nodded. "That's `configuration'," she replied. "If you have trouble with words again you ask me, yes?"

Duo nodded silently and quickly. "Thanks, Miss. That's great," he said, half of him really meaning it and the other half of him cringing desperately with the laughter coming from Aubrey as soon as the teacher left.

He frowned as Persephone got to her feet with a book in her hand and walked up to her brother from behind. She gave him a swift slap across his head with the book and a "Stop laughing, you insensitive buffoon!" before sitting back down with an indignant "hmph!" and getting back to her work.

Duo didn't know whether to thank her or wish to be sucked into a black hole. He knew he'd suffer for it later either way so he stayed silent until he was dismissed by Miss Johansson.

`This is *perfect*!' Duo shouted inwardly, once more on that hill and looking over his schedule. `Calm down, Duo. You thought that about I.T. this morning and looked what happened there. But no, maybe you have got a chance with this. It doesn't matter how much you get picked on, just blow them away with your raw talent! Now who needs calming down?'

Duo stood more confidently in his next lesson, fully adorned in his athletics gear and basking in the warm outside air. `Great, looks like I'm in this class with Quatre again,' he thought as he glanced across the track. `Maybe we've got the same timetable… wouldn't that just be my luck!'

He tore his eyes away from the little blond, wondering desperately why he couldn't get April 30th out of his mind. Looking at that face, smiling with his `friends' reminded him of every last little detail. How *Duo* had once been the one to make Quatre smile. `I did a lot more than make him smile,' he thought to himself. `No, wearing short shorts, don't go there, Duo.'

The one moment in his life when he believed his ears may explode then occurred as Miss Sutherfield blew a screeching football whistle at full volume from just about two feet behind him.

"Relay teams, people! Go!" she shouted coarsely, clapping her hands at them. Duo had heard about P.E. teachers before but had never taken that overblown reputation seriously. He wished he had. "There's an odd number of you here now so do it quickly or you'll be on the bench!"

Before he had time to blink, the rest of the class had teamed up and he was left standing on his own. "Okay, Maxwell! Bench!" the teacher's voice thundered in his ears.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said, waving his hand dismissively to the side and dropping down onto the bench whilst all the others grabbed batons and lined up along the track.

Duo sighed at the predictability of the situation and swung his legs up to lie back on the flat piece of wood on two sticks that seemed to constitute a bench. `Eh, they won't be running relays all year. I'll get my chance next time,' he told himself, just a little pissed off that he had to rationalise every bad lesson he'd had. Which, so far, had been *every* lesson.

A little while later, the teacher blew her whistle and bellowed a "gather over here, people!" across the track. Duo obeyed and hopped off the bench, sauntering over as casually as he could under the circumstances.

"Alright!" Sutherfield yelled again, despite the fact that no student was outside a ten foot radius. "As you all know, there's this huge, colony-wide athletics competition coming up! They want the best from each school to go along and see what they can do and maybe get picked for the teams. So, I need to shuffle people around to check out relay times. Patterson, bench! Maxwell, replace Patterson and show us what you can do."

"Ooh, lucky me. I'm on display," Duo said sarcastically as he switched places with Aubrey. `Whose last name is apparently Patterson- hang on, that means… Persephone Patterson? P.P.? What cruel parents.'

Duo stood reluctantly alongside P.P. and smiled artificially. "Hi Persephone, Chastity," he offered in his peppy manner. "Hello *Quatre*" he added, much more darkly this time.

Persephone bounced up and down and squealed. "Oh Dio! I bet you're so good at this! You run the last leg, okay?" she said, pushing him into position on the circuit. He waited for the other students to line up and the whistle to go before readying himself.

"Oh crap," he muttered to himself. The first two changeovers on his team had been a nightmare. `Well, here goes nothing,' he thought, practically snatching the baton from Quatre and sprinting down to the finish line as best he could, but still crossing the line completely alone for several seconds.

`Did we really lose that badly?' he wondered. `I mean, those changeovers sucked but I thought I made up for it.' He was about to turn around and see what was going on until the other four last-leg runners rushed past him in a bid for second, third and fourth place.

"Oh," he said in a surprised, yet satisfied tone. "Aah!" he yelped as Persephone ran up from behind him and threw her arms around his shoulders yelling "We won! We won!"

"Yeah, we won," Duo said calmly in a bid to subdue her, peeling her arms from his shoulders. "Happy about that, are we?" he joked as she continued to bounce around the track.

There was ridiculously loud clapping - from one person at least - coming from behind them. "Nice job, Maxwell!" Ha. Guess who. "You're definitely a candidate for our track tests. You too Winner. Those last legs certainly compensated for the other screw-ups! I want you two at the start of the 100 metres. Go!"

Duo shrugged and made his way over along with the other six runners who'd been chosen, grabbing a spot at the far side of the track. "Okay!" Miss Sutherfield boomed again. "Next week, the school's having a time trial run of the 100m. Whoever places in that run will go along to L4 track tryouts. I wanna see enthusiasm here!"

`Oh come on,' Duo thought to himself. `The others here can't even hope to match the speed of a Gundam pilot.'

And so it was, he practically ran the race himself, almost leaving even Quatre in the dust. He braced himself for the deafening shriek from Miss Sutherfield's whistle only a few centimetres from his ear. `Why does she seem to like that goddamned thing so much?' he wondered angrily.

Duo could still hear the ringing fifteen minutes after the lesson had ended, sitting on that same old hillside and studying his ass off. He lay on his back, looking up at the colony's upper limit. `I'd swear to God that that's actually got blue sky just underneath it,' he thought to himself as his gaze slipped out of focus and he closed his eyes.

"Shit, was that a bell?" he thought aloud, sitting up straight after he realised he'd fallen asleep against the pseudo-grass beneath his head. "Well that was nice while it lasted." He dragged himself to his feet, feeling sick with dread. `I'm sure I've got another English lesson tomorrow morning too. I'm in over my head here, I know it.

`I wanted an education more than anything in my whole life but I've bitten off way more than I can chew… I'll just leave in the morning,' he decided, one lone tear slipping down his face as he walked along. `I've probably got enough money for a flight back to L2. Maybe I'll go see Hilde. See if she needs any help at the salvage yard. Last I heard she had a fiancée… hmph, he'd better be nothing less than a god for her.'

He sniffed and blinked for a moment before turning his key in the lock. `That's weird… I locked the door. That means someone opened it. Oh god, someone's been going through my stuff, I just know it.' He sighed and unlocked the door again, "There'd better not be somebody in there," he said loudly. "If that's some prefect then you should know I'm gonna hightail it outta here first thing if-"

Duo stopped in his tracks and gaped at the boy sat on the bed opposite his own. He was so numb with shock he could barely move, opening his mouth to speak and failing to utter a single word. `What- what's he doing here?'

"New roommate," the boy offered, almost reading his mind as he got to his feet and walked over to close their distance to about a foot. "How've you been?"

"I- I don't… uh, fine I guess," Duo stammered as he looked him in the face. He was suddenly aware of just how loud his breathing was. He gulped and felt his lip quiver, reaching out tentatively to touch the other boy's shoulder. "Heero…"

TBC…