Title: Desert
Author: JC Sun

Rating: R or NC-17 for semi-graphic yaoi penetration. No self-lubricating parts.
Category: One-shot, Heero-Quatre.
Summary: It's dry in the desert.

*

Quatre's told him that in the long-distant, unimaginably faded past, this was the rich farming land at the heart of an empire, and that the dried river-bed underneath his feet flooded the delta every spring, bringing water and thick black silt from the headwaters somewhere deeper in the continent. It was lush almost to the point of tropical, so the conquerors, born and raised in the desert where water was sacred, called it Paradise and built palaces in it.

Now, the black dirt's dried to a powdery, sandy red soil that moves on the wind when not held down by the dry, brittle grass bleached to a pale white eleven months of the year. In spring, heavy rain moves across the grass, but for now, it stretches for hundreds of kilometers undisturbed in either direction excepf for the occaisional pile of ruins, and it's the color of Quatre's hair. A little darker, maybe, Heero decides, as he lifts the sleeve of his outer-garment to keep the dust from a sudden wind from getting his eyes.

If the grass's of the same color as Quatre's hair, then the inside of the palace, the tiled mosaic that covers their rooms chest-height is the color of Quatre's eyes, a strange, faded blue that must have been a brilliant indigo in the past, but rubbed by time and the sand that drifts across the floor and will not be shut out. . . When Heero climbs the steps back up to the fortress, underneath the arched door and the courtyard with the sand-choked fountain back into their rooms, in fact, that's all he finds, a few cushions, the neat grouping of blankets on tile floor that serves as their bedding, and the dust scurrying across the floor. No laptop, no Quatre, and --

"In here. I'm taking a bath."

The place is mountaintop fortress with immense cisterns fed by a natural spring, so there's no shortage of water here, and Quatre takes baths twice a day, sometimes more. He says it's because the sand gets stuck in his hair and drives him crazy, but Heero rather suspects that Quatre does it because he can. After months and months of sonic showers in space, water baths are a novelty even with coarse soap and no hot water.

The bathtub lies in another room and is tucked into a dip in the wall, out of the way of the sand and wind, so the extraordinary blue tiling has been preserved. Bits of the mosaic that once covered both of the rooms still remain, Quatre floats, eyes half-closed, a little slip of a thing floating in a pool of water that's almost black in the navy-tiled tub and specked with the coming down through the skylight cut in stone forty feet above them. Heero's laptop sits on the counter in an alcove carved into the wall next to the bath, and it's blinking and whirring as it monitors the perimeter for intruders and scans the Net for news.

Quatre makes a small, disgusted noise as he fishes out a drowned fly with his thumb and forefinger, then drops it out of the tub with a grimace on his face.

"You wouldn't have that problem elsewhere." Heero says. The city that they'd stumbled into when they first came out of the desert -- like most of the substantial towns in this part of the world -- had a Winner residence and everything that meant. Quatre had known how to get to the place surely enough and had stood in front of the wrought iron gates, hand poised above the call button for a moment, then with a sudden flick of the shoulders, he'd turned around. 'Come on, Heero', he'd said. 'I know a place where we can stay for a while.'

Quatre's told him that the people who built this place regarded portraits as of idolatry, so their mosaics are all artful geometry. This room, for example, is done with water-lilies floating in pools. Small, faded pink tiles were the blossoms and green horizontal ones are the leaves as they float on water only marginally clearer than the sky above them. In the other rooms, small golden tiles representing goldfish and dragonflies, and the skylight is rimmed about with birds-of-paradise.

It's as if the builders crammed the interior of the place with representations of life in order to make up for the fact that outside, there's nothing where there's nothing for miles except for grass and sky and dust. There's a colony of pigeons, too, housed in the upper stories of the place; Heero can hear them leaving their roosts at dawn, a soft rush of wings, and at sunset, when they drop from the red sky down, down into the courtyard that's and the dried out fountain. He'd come back from patrol yesterday to find Quatre scattering crumbs to a giant flock of them, a few bold ones practically perching on his shoulders and the rest gathered at his feet.

Heero hadn't had the heart to tell Quatre to stop.

Now, he turns back to his laptop. It's a nice bit of work: it'd been Duo's birthday present to him. They'd been in some spaceport, waiting for their contact to show up, and Duo had found out that Heero neither knew nor celebrated his birthday. So Duo decided that day was Heero's birthday and had lifted a top-of-the-line laptop from some unsuspecting corporate traveler while they were waiting at the airport. Later, when they were 'celebrating' Heero's 'birthday' with a dinner of cold sandwiches and warm soda in their hotel room, Duo had presented it to him, saying,

"You've stolen goddamn torpedoes, so don't you dare lecture me about stealing something like this. It'll come in handy someday. You know -- if we ever get separated or something, you can find me with it. "

Heero's been tinkering with it after dinner these days for lack of anything better to do, and he's coaxed some more speed out of the processor and rewired the motherboard somewhat to deal with it. He picked up a better albeit broken wireless modem for it on one of his trips into town, and now that he's finished repairs on it, he's been working on it for the last few nights, further reconfiguring it so that it would work with the rewritten interface protocols that Heero's rigged for his Netscanning programs.

The programs themselves aren't much, just modified versions of the standard ones with a few extra capabilities grafted onto the commercial skeleton.

"Do you ever dream, Heero?"

Heero knows that Quatre doesn't sleep much these days. At night, they take turns on watch even with the bot-perimeter that Heero's established at key points, and he knows that Quatre lets him sleep long past the change of the watch. The first couple of times that Quatre did it, Heero refused to go back to sleep, but Quatre had also refused to go to bed. So they both ended up sitting in the tower, waiting on sunrise in dead silence, wrapped up against the pre-dawn chill.

It gets pretty cold here at night, but in the day, it's hot. Even now in the winter season, the daytime temperature runs from hot to scorching hot, but in the baths, deep in the heart of the place and with the huge cisterns located directly overhead, it's decidedly cool. The light shaft is almost forty feet up and small to begin with, so the room's pretty dark to boot, and Quatre's damp skin practically gleams in the darkness. He's gotten a little tanner since coming back from space, but not much, particularly since he spends most days buried deep inside the palace. Whenever he goes out, he's always wrapped up from head to toe partly, Heero suspects, to keep anyone from recognizing him.

Quatre spends most of his days inside the compound, fixing meals, keeping their quarters tidy and taking bath after bath after bath. At times, Heero finds himself amazed that Quatre's not permanently wrinkled from all the time he spends in the water.

Instead, Quatre is as smooth as the tiles in the bathtub and very pale against their dark blue lacquer, and he picks out a dried leaf floating in the bathtub with fingers that glow. The leaf must've gotten past the cistern filters which are probably broken; Heero reminds himself to buy some wire netting the next time he's in town. Quatre idly drops the leaf out of the side of the bathtub; it hits the tiled ground without a sound, but there's a splash when Quatre slips back into the bathtub.

The splash puts a droplet on the side of the bathtub. and Heero watches it, wondering if it will drop onto the leaf. It hangs on the smooth side of the bathtub for a moment, caught by static friction, and Heero's just calculating probable paths when Quatre reaches over and touches him with a hand wet with water.

The fingertips are only faintly ridged from immersion in water. Quatre traces up the inside of Heero's wrist, along the fine blue veins, dripping water all the way up. It's deliciously cool on Heero's skin, washing away the coat of fine red dust from outside, and when Quatre takes his hand away, droplets run back down Heero's arm, picking up dust until rust-colored, they hang on the edge of his wrist, magnifying the small lines circle Heero's wrists before dropping onto the tiled rim and sliding into the tub where Quatre sits, eyes patient and naked arms wrapped around knees. The small, golden hairs on his arms are trapped in droplets of water, and if he concentrates, Heero can see the hairs, suspended in light and time as he reaches out and traces Quatre's collarbones lying just barely above the surface of the water.

Underneath his fingers, the skin's even smoother than he's dreamed it. When he looks back up, he catches the strange, strange color of Quatre's eyes, now a blue so dark as to almost be navy, so close to the color of his own that Heero has the odd feeling of looking into a mirror. And the hair is thoroughly soaked, so it's darker, and Quatre's mouth is set so hard that the picture is so close that Heero has no problems when Quatre leans in and kisses him.

Quatre's mouth smooth and clean, like water, but after a while, Quatre pulls away, eyes half-lidded now. "I don't like kissing all that much, really."

"Really?" Heero says, stripping off his shirt and tossing it into the corner before turning back to Quatre, who's stood up and is slowly stepping out of the tub and onto the tile floor.

"Not really. It's too. . . intimate. Too wet and slippery, and you can never see while it's going on. " He pulls out a small, half-used tube of lubricant out of the pile of his clothes.

With something like a smile quirking the edges of his face, Heero pulls off his pants.

*

The rim of the bathtub is cool against Heero's face.

He's surprised by the pain. He'd forgotten how it hurts, how it feels like something's ripping you apart from the inside, and at first, the pleasure's long and rare in between. It's like an exercise in holding your breath, and every time you work up the energy and guts to exhale, there comes another jolt of pain so that you forget what exactly you were doing beforehand, and while he knows could just as easily shunt the pain off into some little corner of his brain into the same place where he sticks broken bones, but. . .

It would be wrong, somehow, so Heero leans back into Quatre even though it makes him grip the tiling so hard his knuckles are white splotches against his tanned hands. Behind him, he hears Quatre make soft, apologetic noises, but Quatre doesn't let go. Instead, he slides his hands underneath to stroke Heero high across the hips, his fingers skating against the edge of pubic hair, then, to cup Heero's hipbones and to pull him up towards him, holding him so closely that Heero prevents himself from crying out only by clamping teeth down on his lip.

And they hover that way, for a moment. Quatre stops moving, and through the haze, Heero's exquisitely aware of the aching erection that's somehow developed, as well as the agony, and with a conscious wrench of his will, keeps himself from shunting that pain away. It. . . He can't. He won't. . . His hands, hanging in the bathtub, willing the ache to come up and get rid of some of the pain. With another wrench, he forces himself to keep his hands down on the bathtub rim.

And then, Quatre moves his hips again, just a fraction more, just a bit to the side and hits something , so in the midst of the pain, pleasure explodes up and down Heero's veins , burning away all memory of pain and every other thought in his mind. When moans of the sudden pleasure flaring up and down ever nerve. and when Quatre hits that place again, Heero has the vague notion that he's sobbing. Once more, and Heero's hips stabbing forward compulsively, Quatre moving in him the whole time and Quatre's hands still firmly planted on his hips.

Then, Heero lies there, trembling for a moment, listening to Quatre's breath starting to come in quick, damp pants, and he stares at his arms, still hanging uselessly down the side of the bathtub. Heero closes his eyes to gather his energy, then uses them for leverage and pushes off to lean backwards into Quatre, and Heero covers Quatre's hands with his own.

Then, Quatre slips a hand up to twist Heero's nipple hard at the bottom of one of his deeper thrusts, and Heero moans and writhes upward against both, pressing against his own hands that are entwined Quatre's restraining arm. His head lashes to the side, voice tightening to a growl, and with a gasp that echoes around the room, Quatre wraps his arms around Heero and presses his cheek to Heero's almost tenderly. They hang like that for a moment, and Heero feels Quatre's breaths pressing into his back, his narrower hips braced on top of Heero's wider ones, and his sweat moving down Heero's cheek and shoulders.

*

Afterwards, after dinner, Heero's sitting on the doorstep of their rooms with the last fragments of sunset slanting through the clouds and down into the courtyard, creating strange shadows out of the lacy stonework. One of the pleasantries of living in the desert is that there's either too little water or too much cold to support mosquitoes, so he sits in the doorway, more or less naked.

Strange, Heero thinks. By now, the pigeons are usually in the courtyard, billing and cooing before going up for the night, but today, they flew straight up to the belfry, although there are a few scattered pigeon feathers in the center of the square. He can even see a few scraps of the bread that Quatre scattered that afternoon.

For dinner, they had their usual dry, quite-stale bread. Quatre supplemented that with a pair of plucked, cleaned fowl that he'd obtained somewhere and had sitting in a mix of chopped wild onions and herbs all afternoon. Rubbed with salt and roasted, they had gone rather well with the wine that Heero had bought on their last trip into town, an achingly sweet vintage with a sharp, surprisingly bitter aftertaste. And since, they didn't have any cups, they had ended up drinking out of the bottle, passing it between them although there certainly wasn't enough to get properly drunk off of and Heero had put it away after a few swigs.

Quatre sits in the other corner, back to the wall and against the corner. Quatre would almost be lost in the shadows, Heero decides, if it weren't for his skin, still pale and gleaming white underneath the thin tee-short and Heero's shorts, which are entirely too big on him. The Spandex hangs loosely around his legs -- he has such small, elegant bones, Heero marvels. Unlike Duo, who's really a peasant underneath that mass of brown hair, Quatre's bones are fluted like a bird's, and even his veins are small in discreet strips of color nestled in the hollow of his pale throat. They're the same height, really, but Heero knows looks taller because he holds himself so straight and because he outweighs Quatre by a good five kilos. The boy looks fragile, like a doll, though Heero knows full well that Quatre, in his own sweet, sunny way, is just as ruthless as any of the rest of them. It makes him more dangerous, Heero supposes, even though Quatre's leaning against the wall, studying the shadows on the floor, trusty Kalishnikov tucked over his knees.

Inside the darkness of the rooms, Heero's laptop suddenly bleeps three times in succession, and groaning with tiredness and the remnants of pain, Heero heaves himself to his feet, but by then, Quatre's already there, having broken through Heero's three-layer passwords and opened his Net-trawling program.

Quatre smiles softly at him. "I'm not the only one who knows something about computers."

Grunting to hide his amusement and the flare of pain from between his legs, Heero drops down to his knees to study the Netforum mesage that the computer's picked up. . . Tagged with the header numbers originating from a German server, the message's ostensible sender is "Hans Skywalker", a reference to an obscure American movie and one of. . . one of. . . Suddenly, Heero feels like he can't breathe and finds that the encryption code is suddenly unreadable, that the numbers all blur together and. . .

"Yeah, so it's from Duo. What else?" Quatre's breath, by his ear, is dry, and his voice rather amused.

Slightly embarrassed to be caught in such an obvious emotion, Heero shoves Duo aside and concentrates on translating the message from the numerical encryption code it scrolls past. "Trowa's there too.They're in New Bangkok, and they've found--there's an OZ lab that has a late-development doll with 'neurogel implant systems'."

After a little pause where he traces the dataflow graph at the top of the computer, Quatre supplies, "They're these artificial neural systems suspended on a jelly-like sustaining matrix. The developers been speculating about them for years, but nobody's come up with a battle-ready system. Theoretically, though, these would give the ultra-fast response time of computer-controlled dolls, but be capable of software-independent biological learning, which has always been sketchy at best. Mobile doll reflexes with human responses."

He blinks, still staring at the screen, his face just a trace worried. "We. . . Well, Heero, looks like we're going to New Bangkok."

Heero blinks at him for a second, dizzy with a sudden emotion he can't believe he's feeling, much less name.

*

end

*

Comments to anasile@aol.com