by Rachel
Part of the After Angels Arc
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing. Catherine's cousin and son are my own invention.
"This life holds its secrets like a seashell holds the sea
soft and distant, calling like a faded memory..."
--Cowboy Junkies
"I'm sorry."
The tall figure hunched over the piano did not turn around. Catherine sighed helplessly and with a touch of exasperation. "I felt put on the spot! What was I supposed to say? I didn't mean to hurt you. You know I'd never do that. But seriously, what was I supposed to say?"
In response Trowa lifted his hands and played a trio of loud chords--C, F sharp, G, each accompanied by a single gruff word, "I. Don't. Know."
"I thought I was doing the right thing, inviting you and Quatre to come with us."
" `Inviting'? Try wheedling, Cathy. You said you needed my support. How was I supposed to refuse you?"
"Would you have?"
B flat and a shrug.
Catherine crossed her arms over her chest and stalked over to the French windows to lean her forehead against the cool glass. "I do need you," she said softly, without turning her head to look at him. "I should have talked it over with you, first. But I thought if I told you where we were going you wouldn't want to come." In a very small voice: "Would you have?"
Both he and the piano were quiet for a long moment. Finally he said, "I wouldn't have wanted to. Quatre would have convinced me. I'd probably have come anyway. But I wouldn't have liked it. Think about it, Cathy. Sasha's your real cousin. She's a blood relative. She has an automatic connection to you that I'll never have. It wasn't easy for me to watch the two of you fly into each other's arms like you've known her your whole life. You made me feel completely worthless."
"You're not worthless to me," Catherine murmured. "I hardly know my cousin. I've known you since we were kids. You and Abdul and Davy are still the three most important people in my life."
"For how long?"
"Huh?"
"For how long is it going to be just us three? How are you going to explain how we are to Davy?" He looked up, finally. His face was very pale, his mouth set in a thin, white line, but his eyes were very much alive and roiling with dark green mist. "You'll say `Davy, this is Sasha, my father's sister's daughter. She's your…second aunt, or something.' And then you'll say, like you did this morning, `And this is your Uncle Trowa. Well, technically,'" doing an awful job of imitating her bubbly soprano, `he's not REALLY your uncle. I mean, I kind of think of him as a brother, but really he's just another orphan who joined the circus during the war.'"
"I didn't say it like THAT," she said, knowing, to her shame that she had; she had to have hurt him deeply to induce this amount of vocalization. She looked out the window again at the grey November sky, and the heavy steel-colored clouds. A few brick red leaves still clung to the black branches of the trees. The rest had fallen into the flagstone-rimmed pond in the garden below. She remembered the pond, though the last time she had seen it she had been all of four years old. There had been frogs in it, catfish, and hyacinths. It had been early summer. Trowa had no memory of it. While they walked past it to the house a few hours ago, he hadn't even blinked, while she hadn't been able to contain an exclamation of recognition.
"I should have gone with Quatre and Abdul."
"Yes, you should have," she replied tonelessly.
"Then you could have at least enjoyed your cousin's company."
Testily: "Yes, probably." Then, whirling about, suddenly angry, "I mean yes, definitely! You should have taken Davy to the playground with Quatre and Abdul and let me visit with my cousin. How many times am I going to get to see her? I can listen to you mope any time. You're twenty-three years old; grow up."
"Triton Bloom would be twenty-three, you mean." Trowa's eyes narrowed to slits, just like a cat's. If his ears could have gone back, Catherine thought, they probably would have.
She struggled to remain angry. She really wanted to be angry with him. It was so hard for her to maintain rage, though. She never wanted to fight with anyone, least of all him. Still, she said in a carefully tight tone, "You, Trowa Barton, however old you are, still need to grow up. You're being a selfish brat and I still love you, but I just can't deal with you, right now." She turned on her heel and stalked out of the living room.
She felt as though she were walking through a dream as she passed through the hallways of her cousin Sasha's house. If she stopped and looked closely at things she found she had no recollection of them. It was the minute things, the things she would not immediately have thought of, that assailed her senses, told her that yes, she had been here a long, long time ago. That soft, barely noticeable scent of pine needles and wet leaves that lingered in every room. The sound of the grandfather clock that stood by the front door, but not the look of it. The color of the butterfly's wings behind glass on the wall--not the butterfly itself, but that wonderfully vibrant blue that shone in the warm light of the hall like a jewel. She had so hoped Trowa would feel the same way she did, would feel some spark of recognition. That was why she had brought him here. It wasn't so much for his support. She had Abdul, and their infant son. Abdul held her every night and loved her and reminded her that her family was to be found in the present and future, not the past. And they both held Davy and told him the same thing. She knew that bringing Trowa here could be awkward--although she hadn't thought about how awkward it could be--but she had to try, had to see if there was something, anything about her cousin's house, which had once been her aunt and uncle's house, that he remembered. But there didn't seem to be, and it had only frustrated both of them and put them both out of temper. Sasha's hadn't known what to do, so she had gone to buy groceries for dinner. And Abdul and Quatre had taken Davy to the playground at the beach to give Catherine and Trowa time alone to talk.
Well, she thought huffily, he didn't seem to be interested in talking, so, neither was she. Sasha had told her before she left that there were trunks and cartons in that attic that no one had opened since her parents had died. Some of them probably contained old photo albums, which probably had pictures of Catherine's parents. With nothing better to do, Catherine climbed the stepladder to the attic. It trembled beneath her feet and she had to climb slowly and with her hands on the steps before her, because they were steep and there was no handrail.
It was cold in the attic. A single lightbulb dangled from a wire in the center of the ceiling; it hummed faintly and gave off a wan, light the color of ancient paper when she tugged the thin chain. The air tasted stale. She heard the wind rattling the shingles of the roof above her head. She hoped it wasn't too cold on the beach. Abdul and Quatre had been even more excited about the prospect of a fancy swing set than the baby was. She hoped they remembered to bring Davy's windbreaker…
Sasha was right; there were boxes and trunks stacked high in all directions, disappearing into the darkness of the attic. They obviously had not been touched in years; the dust looked nearly an inch thick on their tops. Catherine sneezed violently, which only churned dust up into the air, causing her to sneeze again. She looked about for a window, but there was none. All she could do was lie close to the trapdoor that let into the attic and wait for the dust to settle. Once it did she scrambled back to her feet and approached the trunk closest to her.
She did not open it. She stood staring at it for a long time, her hand poised about a foot away from the latch, unable to move any closer. "Come on, Cathy," she said to herself. "Be a little brave. There aren't any ghosts in there. Just answers."
But, answers to what? She knew who she was.
In there, she thought, in there might be all the things she could not remember about her childhood, about her parents. How her mother had worn her hair at her wedding. Whether or not her father had worn glasses. What Triton Bloom really looked like. She had been very young when the war had broken out, barely five years old. There were few clear pictures in her mind of her family, of her childhood. All she had were impressions, feelings that things might have been a certain way, or might not.
She had every reason to want to look inside those trunks. Still, she couldn't do it. Not alone. Trowa was supposed to help her with this, Trowa who had also lost his family and his past, who might, just might find his answers in there as well.
Or he might not.
She sat down on the floor, wrapped her arms around her tucked-up legs, and dropped her chin onto her knee. She wished Abdul were there. He would tell her this was crazy, but he would understand why she had to do this. He would have found something for her to laugh about.
Presently she heard footsteps on the floor below and then the rattle of the stepladder. Sasha, she thought. She hoped her cousin would not be angry that she had gone without her to investigate the attic. In her haste to find something to do that didn't involve Trowa, she hadn't bothered to think that there might be things up here that Sasha would not want disturbed, even though she hadn't mentioned any, before.
The loud sneeze that jolted her from her musings belonged to Trowa, however. She turned her head and raised her eyebrows. He was standing on the ladder. His spill of light brown hair hid his eyes from her, but she caught his small, slightly nervous smile. His gaze seemed locked on his hands, which rested on the floor in front of him, long fingers laced together as he mumbled, "Sorry." Cathy sniffed haughtily. "You're not going to make this easy for me, are you?" He did not seem to expect an answer. "Quatre called," he told her, with a bemused sigh. "He always knows when I'm agitated about something. Davy got bored with the playground, so he and Abdul are taking him to the aquarium. Actually, I think Quatre and Abdul are more excited about the aquarium than Davy is."
"What you mean is, Abdul and Quatre decided to let us deal with each other ourselves."
He didn't look up. "Um, yeah. Quatre told me once that Abdul doesn't really know how to act around me, so I guess… Anyway, I told him what we were fighting about. Quatre, I mean. He told me I was being a jerk."
"Quatre is a very smart man."
"He also said you were being a jerk--"
"ExCUSE m--"
"--But that if I ever told you that, he'd kill me."
Despite herself, Catherine felt a corner of her mouth working its way up into a small smile. "You always did like to live dangerously."
"Quatre's not really violent by nature. He'll take it out on me in other ways." Even in artificial dusk of the attic, she could see his blush. Her smile deepened with bemusement. All these years, and Quatre still thought she was after his blood, as though his long ago promise to let her kill him if he ever hurt Trowa, even inadvertently, were the most solemn and binding of oaths. She had every intention of telling him--some day--that she loved him for everything he had done for Trowa, up to and including this blush. However, she also had fun keeping him on his toes. "What else did Quatre call us?" she prompted.
"It's not really what he said. It's what he made me realize. I realized that when you were introducing us to your cousin and you couldn't figure out what I was, I was jealous. Of Triton. I was never jealous of him before, and I have no right to be." He seemed to struggle for a moment. The shadows glancing across his face deepened as his brow furrowed and the little worried crease appeared between his eyebrows, as it always did when he was thinking hard. Finally he said, in a voice that was soft and hushed as the dry darkness, "Triton didn't give you away at your wedding. I did. And he wasn't there when Abdul fainted when Davy was born. I was. Quatre and I are Davy's godparents, not Triton and whoever. I don't know what that makes me, but whatever it is, I'm more than he is. But when you were talking to your cousin…I never wanted to be him so much in my life. This name I've been using for the last eight years isn't mine. I--borrowed it, I guess. I just--that's all a name ever was to me, before. A convenience or an inconvenience. So, I wanted his name. Triton's. And then I started thinking about all the things I have that he doesn't and I felt bad for wanting the one thing he has that I don't. And I guess I took it out on you. I'm sorry."
Catherine lost her self-control. "I hate you!" she burst out.
Trowa looked stunned. His mouth dropped open and the crease between his eyebrows deepened. "Why?"
"Because you always do this!" she wailed. "You make me furious and then you come around five minutes later and say the sweetest things and the things I need to hear the most and you make me feel like such a horrible witch for being mad at you in the first place!"
"Sorry," he said meekly. "You had every right to be angry…"
"You're doing it again! Idiot." She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. He clung to the top rung the ladder with one hand and wrapped the other around her slender shoulders.
"Now I'm crying," she snuffled, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand. His arm around her tightened. "You're such an idiot." She pulled away and smiled at him wanly, while tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. "Triton was three when I lost him. I hardly knew him. I don't think I was aware enough to really know him. I loved him because…I don't know. He made me a sister. I loved being his big sister. Well, you made me a big sister, too. And I KNOW you." She touched his cheek. "Abdul is my husband and I love him with all my heart. I love Davy more than my own life. But you were there first. Nothing changes that. Okay?"
He produced a crumpled, pale blue handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at her wet cheeks. "Sorry, Cats."
She sighed. "You're the only one who gets to call me that and not get the stuffing beaten out of him."
"You used to throw knives at me. Remember?"
That elicited a slight grin. "Yeah. But I usually missed, didn't I?"
"Yeah." There was a moment of silence while they smiled sheepishly at each other. Finally he said, a little nervously, "Um, Cats, do you want me here while you do this? I mean, Sasha's your cousin and all and…"
"Were you even listening to what I said? Get up here." She grabbed him by the front of his turtleneck sweater and began to haul him the rest of the way up the ladder.
"Wait--wait," he protested, easily extricating himself from her grip. "I left something downstairs…"
She waited in bewilderment while he hurried back down the ladder. When he returned half a minute later he had a teapot tucked securely in the crook of his arm, two teacups dangling from two fingers, and a plate of chocolate muffins in his hand. He nearly dropped them when he bumped his head on the attic's low ceiling.
"I got these at that bakery across the street. These were going to be my last resort, if unburdening my soul to you didn't work," he explained once she had finished scolding him for climbing a ladder one-handed. Catherine continued to glare at him, but she accepted the tea and the muffins.
Sasha returned while they were only halfway through the first trunk. Trowa had become engrossed in some old science journals he found, which halted their investigation. Catherine apologized profusely, but Sasha was not angry with them for going ahead without her. She knew this was a very personal experience for Catherine, and had assumed her cousin would rather be with the people she knew well than with a virtual stranger, even if Sasha was a blood relative. She pointed Catherine and Trowa toward the trunks most likely to contain family photos, and then disappeared discretely down the ladder, saying she would call them down when Abdul, Quatre, and Davy returned.
The trunks contained old books and clothes, mostly. When Catherine found the occasional photo album, Trowa would scoot close to her while she thumbed through it nervously, her eyes scanning the pictures for familiar faces. Once, completely enwrapped in an album, she jumped in surprise when Trowa touched her shoulder lightly.
"Sorry. You're shaking, Cats."
She made a half-hearted attempt to shrug him away. "I'm frustrated," she said, finally, when he refused to budge. "I see all these people and I feel like I should recognize at least some of them, but I don't. And I don't even know if it's because I forgot them or if I never knew them to begin with."
Trowa gave her a comforting hug. "If you lost your family when you were five, how well can you be expected to remember them? What were you expecting to find?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. Someone who looks like me." She could not say, And maybe someone who looks like you, too.
Trowa gave her a long, strange look, as though he somehow sensed there were words that had gone unspoken. He covered her hands with his on the photo album and gave her that small, disarming, bow-shaped smile he always gave her right before doing something crazy. He said, gently, "You know how Duo and Hilde always argue over who little Helen looks like? Everyone knows she looks like Duo, but he just can't see it. He thinks she's the mirror image of Hilde. Quatre doesn't believe me when I tell him he looks just like his sister Aravis. I think people don't always see themselves in other people." His smile deepened a little, at one corner. "This is my theory. So, if you want, I'll look for your parents."
She stared up at him. He returned her gaze calmly. She fought to keep her expression neutral and her hands from shaking. Didn't he feel any trepidation about seeing these faces? Wasn't he even curious? She wondered wildly if she had been wrong to suspect, all these years.
He took the album from her hands and leaned against the trunk with it propped against his knees. She watched his face carefully as he turned each page, her heart pounding. His expression did not change, except for an occasional slight frown, which softened as he decided he had not yet found what he was looking for.
Finally, to keep herself from going crazy, she took a muffin, popped it into her mouth, and picked up an old fashion magazine she had discovered in one of the trunks. She barely glanced at the pages, however; her gaze kept stealing to Trowa. Finally, she said, because she had to say something, "These are pretty good. They're not as good as the ones Quatre made, the last time you two visited us."
That elicited another smile, this one soft and tender. "He's gotten very good at baking," he said without looking up.
"I was so afraid the two of you would starve when you first moved in together. But it's been five years, and you're still alive. I was wrong about you two."
"What are you saying, Cats?" He closed the photo album, set it down, and picked up another.
She sighed and tore into a second muffin. "I need chocolate," she muttered. "What I'm trying to shay," she said as she munched and idly flipped the pages of her magazine, "ish that I think Quatre hash thish noshin' that I hate him." She swallowed, then made a face at the hideous hairdo that had apparently been the height of fashion fifteen years ago. "And I don't. Hate him, I mean."
"He's not an easy person to hate."
"So I noticed! Sometimes I feel like I love him against my better judgement. Maybe that's true of all the people I love. Except Davy. Don't tell Quatre." She lifted her head to flash him a mischievous grin and was startled to find him looking at her intently.
He glanced at the open photo album he held, then back at her face again. Some fleeting emotion flickered across his face, but it passed too quickly for her to recognize it. He rose to his knees, crossed the short expanse of the attic floor, and held the photo album toward her. "Cora Bloom," he said softly.
Catherine did not take the album immediately. She stared at him for what seemed a long time. "You're sure?" she breathed.
He nodded. "It's on the back of the photo. She looks--just like you, Cats. Take it." He had to put the album into her shaking hands, fold her fingers around the edges. Once he was sure the album would not fall if he let go, he retreated to the other side of the attic.
Catherine stared at the page, blinking rapidly. The colors were too bright. And for some reason, she was having difficulty breathing. In one of the pictures a young woman with a thick braid of russet hair was sitting on a tire swing that dangled from a leafless tree branch, and smiling over her shoulder, at someone standing to the left of whoever was taking the picture. The sun was in her eyes, making it impossible to tell their color. She was smiling widely. That was all Catherine saw before tears blurred her vision.
There were footsteps, and then strong arms wound around her shoulders and she felt herself pulled against a hard, muscled chest. "Sorry, Cats," Trowa whispered. She wondered what he was apologizing for. "Is it her?"
"I don't know!" she sobbed, striking the album with her fist. "I don't recognize her!"
He took the album from her and pulled her closer against him. "I'm sorry, Cats. I don't know what else to say." She wept helplessly and inarticulately for a long time, while he rocked her gently. She heard his voice whispering dimly above her head, like the wind in the trees outside: "How can you be expected to remember someone you haven't seen in twenty years? You were only five when you lost her. Cats, I never told you this, but Quatre's been helping me try to remember things from my childhood. I do remember some things, now. Little things. But I still can't see the faces of my parents clearly. Sometimes I feel like I betrayed them somehow, by not remembering. Quatre says it's not true, and I know he's right, but sometimes I can't help feeling he's wrong and if I just try harder I could…" He kissed her hair. "Sis, I think I know how you feel, I'm trying to say."
It occurred to Catherine, through her grief, that he had not called her "Sis" in years. It struck her as strange that now, of all times, he should revert to the name he had called her so trustingly, while suffering from amnesia more than eight years ago. She said into his sweater, almost choking on her tears as she did, "That's exactly how I feel. Trowa, do you think…if something happened to me while Davy was still a baby, that he would forget what I looked like, too?"
He hugged her tightly. "Don't talk like that. Please. You and Abdul are going to raise Davy. He's going to have everything we didn't have, growing up. Two parents…forty-one uncles."
She lifted her head. "Forty-one?"
He nodded. "Thirty-nine Maguanacs besides Abdul, plus me and Quatre."
She dropped her head back against his chest and sighed gustily. "I'm so glad you're here, Trowa. More than anyone else." She wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed.
He squeezed back and smiled down at her. "I'm here, Cats. And I'm not going anywhere." He retrieved the album from the floor and brought it close so they could both see the pictures. "In a way, you found them again; they're part of Davy, too. Maybe one day you'll see something in his face or the way he acts that has nothing to do with you or Abdul and you'll realize he's like his grandparents. Or like Triton."
She stole a glance at him, but the angle and his long bangs prevented her from seeing his eyes.
"When do you think this picture was taken?"
She forced herself to look down at the photograph. "I don't know. She looks so young. She might have been younger than I am, now."
"Do you want me to turn the page?"
Catherine shook her head. She stared at her mother. Though she was seated in the photograph, she could tell that Cora Bloom was tall; her feet almost touched the grass on either side of the dangling tire. The tilt of her neck suggested grace. Her face was delicate, with wide, high cheekbones sloping down to a pointed chin. "I wonder who she's smiling at," Catherine mused. "Maybe my father."
"Maybe you."
She shivered slightly. "Maybe. I don't remember a tire swing at all. That sweater, though… I think I remember it." She brushed the glossy photograph lightly with her fingertips. "No, I remember the color. How could I forget anything that loud? I think maybe she knitted it. I remember watching her knit things. Maybe that's it. I can almost smell her, but I can't remember what color her eyes were. I'm going to come back to this. I have to look at something else right now, though." Trowa didn't say anything, so she turned the page.
On the next she found a picture of a women who bore so striking a resemblance to her cousin Sasha that she knew she had to be her father's sister. No one else was familiar to her, so she turned the page again. And again. There were pictures of other women and men that she did not recognize at all. There were pictures of Sasha as a young girl, with her parents, with her brother who had been killed in the war.
And there, on the third to last page, was a picture of a handsome man in his late twenties, with short brown hair that spilled over a high, smooth forehead, sitting on a wooden picnic table outside what might have been the flap of a circus tent. His orange and royal blue bodysuit bespoke the long, lissome frame of an acrobat. He was grinning at whoever was taking the picture, one hand held over his eyes to block the intense glare from the sun. A little girl with bouncy red curls and long, skinny legs clad in purple stockings, was perched on one knee. In her hands she held what looked like a pink, plastic unicorn with very matted white hair. On the other knee sat a boy not more than two years old, with a delicate little face and a shock of wheat-brown hair. The man had an arm wrapped protectively around the boy's waist, as though he was afraid he would fall if he let go. The boy's face was tilted upward toward David Bloom's, and he was smiling.
"Trowa, smile," Catherine commanded, in a voice that already knew.
Surprised, Trowa's lips folded into that shy little bow of a smile, identical to young Triton Bloom's.
"You're not angry that I went ahead without you?" Catherine asked worriedly as she snuggled against her husband in the foldout bed in her cousin's guestroom.
Abdul wrapped his arms around her and ruffled her hair gently. "I told you already. `Course not. I know why you needed Trowa with you. I don't mind. He took care of you before I got there; he was there, first. `Sides, I got to bond with my son. And my former master, who thinks he knows everything."
"You got to play on the fancy swing set, you mean," Catherine admonished mildly, reaching up to kiss the corner of his mouth.
"Well, yeah, that was pretty cool, too," he admitted.
She exhaled, then said, slowly, staring up at the ceiling, "It was so weird finding those pictures. Weird is the wrong word. I don't know. It wasn't anything like what I expected. Now I feel like there's two of me, the girl I remember being, and me, now. I remember all the years between us--the two of me--but when I don't think about them carefully, they kind of blur. No, I'm not making sense." She raised herself on her elbows and frowned down at him. "When I was really little, like just after I joined the circus, I used to try to lose myself. I felt like I had been split in half and somehow lost one half of me. I thought if I could get myself so far away from my new life, so lost that I would never be able to find it again, I'd bump into my old life. I used to hide, whenever I could get away from the Manager and his wife and the rest of the troupe. I liked them a lot. They were really good to me. But I thought that if they couldn't find me it would be like my new life didn't exist and my old life would find me. I would look up and my mom or dad would be there and they'd say, `Oh, there you are, Cathy.'"
Abdul lifted a hand and held it over her eyes. He lifted it after a few seconds, and smiled as she blinked in confusion. "There you are," he whispered.
"I'm glad you found me."
He had begun to kiss his way from her shoulder to her temple and she was whispering half-heartedly, "We shouldn't--Sasha--" when an insistent wailing rose from the portable crib in the corner.
"Hungry cry. Your department," Abdul said and flopped back against the pillows.
Catherine swung to her feet quickly and went to her crying son. "Whatza mattuh, baby?" she crooned as she lifted the infant in her arms and smoothed the ultra-fine black hair that crowned his little head. "Hungry again already, widdle piggy?"
"It's not possible we're stunting his verbal development or something, talking at him like that, is it?" Abdul wondered as Catherine climbed back into bed beside him.
"I don't think so," Catherine said as she helped Davy to her breast. "If it did, wouldn't lots of people talk funny? What are you looking at?"
Abdul propped his chin up with his fist and grinned impudently. "My wife, half-naked, feeding my son. Pretty rare thing to see on L4."
"I should hope so!"
He tugged her hair playfully.
When Davy had had his fill Catherine pulled up her nightgown and burped him against her shoulder.
"You're a mess," Abdul mock-admonished, lifting a finger to wipe away the thin white dribble from his son's chin. "Yechh."
Davy looked, wide-eyed from one parent to the other. "Bah!" he squealed and waved his arms.
Catherine and Abdul stared at each other. Abdul broke the silence first: "You heard that, right? He said `Da'! He said `Da'!"
"What! He did not! He said…"
It was close to midnight, but Quatre and Trowa were still awake when the phone rang. Quatre was sitting up in bed in their room at the quaint bed-and-breakfast a mile down the road from Sasha's house, reading, with Trowa's head cradled in his lap. Trowa did not move to get up, so Quatre answered the phone. "Information."
Trowa tilted his head back to favor his lover with an upside down smile. "Shut up, you smart ass."
Quatre grinned and cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. "That's exactly what Abdul just said. Shh." He laid a finger over Trowa's lips. Trowa kissed it.
"I don't know," Quatre said. "Maybe he thinks he's a sheep. Oh. I don't know. I'll ask Trowa."
"What?"
Quatre grinned down at him. "In your estimation, does `Bah' mean `Da' or `Ma.' Choose carefully."
"Oh, God." Trowa picked up Quatre's free hand and hid his own face with it.
"Trowa thinks Davy thinks he's a sheep, too," Quatre said brightly.
"I do not!"
Catherine's sharp exclamation of disgust was audible. Trowa grabbed Quatre's wrist, and brought the phone close to his mouth. "I did NOT say that," Trowa protested. "Don't call me a traitor, Cats. No, I DO love you." He listened to his sister snarl at him for a minute. Then he said, with a weary sigh, " `B' has a soft sort of sound, like `m', I guess."
"But `d' is closer to `b' in the alphabet," Quatre said, leaning over him.
"Davy doesn't know that."
"Yes, he does; I was teaching him the alphabet song this afternoon."
"Quatre, he's not even a year old. He probably wasn't saying anything."
Quatre shrugged.
Just then, Davy exclaimed, "Gah-weh!"
Trowa and Quatre looked at each other. "Definitely `Da'", Trowa said and handed the phone back to Quatre.
"Definitely `Ma'," said Quatre and replaced the phone in its cradle. He beamed at Trowa.
Trowa grinned back. "He said `Trowa'", he marveled. "My nephew said my name."
"What!" Quatre looked shocked. "He said `Quatre'! That was so `Quatre'!"
"Excuse me? Since when was there a `w' in `Quatre'?"
"Well, there's no `g' in `Trowa.' The vowels are right for `Quatre.'"
"Vowels shmowels. I'M his uncle."
"So am I! To-be, anyway. In-law. Soon."
"Maybe."
"WHAT!" Quatre's eyes went very big as he stared down at his placidly smiling lover. "Oh, you're kidding." He expelled a relieved breath.
It was Trowa's turn to look at his lover incredulously. "You didn't realize I was kidding right away?" He smirked. "Like I'd deny Cathy the pleasure of seeing you make an honest man out of me, after all these years. After all these years…" he mused softly and with a trace of bewilderment, almost to himself. "She's my real sister. And Davy's my real nephew. I know my name. Quatre, I know it sounds crazy, but I feel like I've known it all these years. It was always THERE. But I didn't realize I knew it until now. I never really lost my family." And then his voice simply stopped.
"You know," Quatre said softly, stroking his hair and smiling lovingly, "on further contemplation, I think you're right. He said 'Trowa.'"
Trowa shook his head firmly. "He said 'Quatre.' You were right about the vowel thing."
Quatre leaned down and kissed him. "Don't be belligerent, beloved. Are you going to teach him to say Triton?"
"I don't know. All my happiest memories have someone calling me Trowa. I don't want to change that. I can't even think of myself as Triton right now. He's still a completely separate person to me. But you can tell your sisters you're marrying a Strasbourg Bloom, not an L-3 Barton. They might like circus performers better than arms manufacturers." He turned his head so that he could see the picture of his two-year-old self, with his father and sister, where it was propped up against the telephone on the bedside table. He sighed wistfully. "I have everything I ever wanted, now. And I'm happy. But for some reason I feel…almost less whole. I feel as though there's two of me, now."
Quatre smiled down at him. "There's only one person in my arms. Trowa or Triton, whatever you call yourself, I'll always know who you are and I'll always love you."
"And Mumtaaz? [1] What does that mean?"
"I was wondering when you would ask me. It means," he said as he bent to kiss the quizzical smile on his lover's lips, "splendid."
Notes:
[1] Quatre's secret name for Trowa, introduced in "Names"