Word Count: 3067

Paris heaved into the grass outside the Gallos’ front gate until his stomach was empty and nothing but the sour taste of his sorrow lingered in the back of his mouth. He gasped and shook with dry sobs that tore through him with a powerful urgency, his wobbling legs threatening to give out beneath him as his sore lungs struggled for the appropriate amount of air.

He felt safe out here, where no one was shadowing his steps or following him with their searching eyes. The houses were spaced further apart on this side of town, with expansive lawns beneath the shade of tall, old trees, set back from the road with bushes and flowerbeds and stone walls surrounding the perimeter to prevent any nosy neighbors from peeping into business that wasn’t their own.

If anyone saw him from their homes, he’d look like nothing more than an insignificant little speck in the distance, too far away to make out clearly, probably explained away as some kid out for a little exercise and nothing to cause concern. Paris didn’t imagine much talk happened between neighbors in this area. The houses were too far apart to encourage unity and close relations between home owners, not like his old neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone else, their names, their faces, their family, their good days and their bad ones. The people here lived in moderate seclusion, each house in its own bubble that very little outside of it could penetrate.

What did any of these people care if one skinny little kid was running himself ragged there on the street? What did any of them care about his life or his problems or a war they were probably barely even aware of?

He preferred it that way. When people cared it made things far more tedious than they needed to be, and Paris had too much time to make up for. Too much that had built up since changing his relationship with Chris and moving in with the Gallos and going to the beach where running had been nearly impossible with Chris and Ladon and Billy around. It had been too long. He’d tried other things in the meantime, but no matter how often he’d attempted to find a new outlet, a different one, a better one, nothing worked quite as well as running did—neither fighting youma in the dark of the night, nor escaping to his moon to submerge himself into memories that were as much his own as they were someone else’s.

Not even dancing helped, as much as he loved it. When he danced there were too many people around and he had to pretend to be someone else—ruling over the Land of Sweets, or sending the Prince to awaken his fair Princess, or enticing men to dance to their deaths. When he danced he had to practice control and restraint. It wasn’t like running. Dance was precision and structure. It was the only thing in his life that had ever been stable, and he liked to keep it that way. He didn’t want to let it be tainted by his suffering, by everything that had ever piled onto his shoulders to push him down, down, down.

That was what running was for. Running was liberation. It was a different sort of freedom than dance. It meant everything could be washed away and pushed out at once, shoved through and scattered until it found some way back in again.

It was much harder to run at the Gallos’ house.

At Chris’s apartment it had been so simple—perhaps a little too simple when Paris thought about it, and he wondered if Chris just hadn’t noticed until it was pointed out to him of if he’d just been too afraid to ask. For the most part, all Paris had needed to do was wait until Chris left for class, then lace up his shoes and head out the door while his boyfriend spent his days on campus. After the first little snafu he’d learned to avoid the doorman, had taken to heading to a nearby park to follow the lesser used trails for added privacy instead.

So much privacy wasn’t usually an option at the Gallos’ house. The place was huge, much larger than it needed to be with only two or three people living there on a regular basis, but somehow Paris always felt as if someone was watching him. The longer he stuck around the more certain he was that Chris had said something to his mother, and the more comments he’d heard the more he’d come to realize that she’d enlisted Peter’s help in turn. Rare were the times when he was left alone, and when he was it wasn’t ever for very long.

Momma Gallo watched him with a suspicious concern veiled beneath wide smiles and her usual flighty behavior. Paris might not have even noticed it if he weren’t constantly on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. Always she seemed only seconds away from asking the sort of questions he had no real answers to, the sort of questions that made him snap an irritated reply and passionately deny the implications when they were expressed by his friends.

“How are you feeling, Precious?” she often asked him.

“I’m feeling fine,” he said.

“Nothing’s bothering you?”

“No,” he replied. And nothing was. Nothing more than usual, at least. It wasn’t ever worth mentioning.

“And dance is going well?” she wondered.

“Yeah, it’s great.”

He could hear the question beneath that went unasked—the one only Ross had been brave enough to voice.

“Has anyone been giving you any trouble about your weight?”

He might as well have asked if Paris was preoccupied with the way he looked.

Of course he wasn’t. He only ever thought about it when people mentioned it, and then it annoyed him that that was what people automatically assumed when they looked at him. He knew they only thought that way because he was a dancer, and because of his career path he was presumed to be more susceptible, even though he didn’t think what he was going through was like that at all.

If he forgot to eat, or he didn’t have much of an appetite, or if he pushed himself too hard sometimes, or if he wasn’t able to sleep, of it he didn’t think he was beautiful anymore, it was only because his mind and his heart were being inundated with grief and regret.

That was what he told himself. That was what he believed to be true. That was what he knew to be true, even if there might have been another tiny piece of him saying, “Wait a minute… slow down… look at what you’re doing to yourself.”

He wished he knew how to convince everyone else of it without giving up one of the only things that made him feel even a fraction better than he did otherwise.

Or perhaps he was merely living in a constant state of denial.

Momma kept him close to her, took him out shopping and asked him to join her during her visits to the salon. She made him sweets every other day, cookies and brownies and cakes she’d whip together while she had him sit at the kitchen bar and talk to her about dance or his plans for school or what he did when he went out. She made him fruity non-alcoholic drinks and then ushered him outside by the pool for a little bit of sun, or sat with him in the cabana and enlisted his help with the planning for some of the charity events she’d taken to hosting.

He could tell she was trying her best to distract him.

Sometimes it worked. Other times he turned to look outside and wished he had more time to himself.

Peter was much less surreptitious. Paris didn’t know if it was because he didn’t know how to be secretive or if he just didn’t see any point in bothering with it.

He stared openly, watching Paris like a scientist might observe a rare specimen, and he made obvious comments—“I’m going to patrol” or “I’m going to watch a movie” or “I’m going to get some ice-cream” like he expected Paris would want to join him when he heard. He came into Paris’s room unannounced to talk about senshi things, chatted over the dinner table about the places he wanted to visit during vacation, always with a “you’ll come, too, Paris!” as if leaving him on his own wasn’t even an option, and he made bold statements like “you’re too skinny” or “you should have more lasagna, Paris!” that made Paris frown and look at himself in the mirror and refuse to believe that Peter was right.

Maybe he’d lost a little weight in the last few months, but it wasn’t anything he thought was too serious. If his waist was thinner it was only because of the corset of his fuku; he’d already noticed the way it had encouraged a subtle change in the shape of his body, adding an even more feminine look to a frame that already lacked an overt masculinity. It wasn’t like his bones were sticking out. His ribs might show a little more now, but it was so slight he didn’t think it made much of a difference, not so much that he thought he looked sickly. He’d always been thin anyway—thin and pale and nowhere near as large as the Gallo men had all grown to be.

But he wasn’t frail. He wasn’t sick—not always. If he liked to run from time to time it wasn’t because he thought poorly about the way he looked and wanted to change it. He did it because there was too much going on in his head and running made him feel better. It gave him the chance to force the pain out so he didn’t feel like it was suffocating him all the time. He ran because he was lost and upset and had no clue how else he was supposed to fix anything.

All he wanted was relief. All he wanted was to forget for a while.

He didn’t understand why that was so bad.

Finally, after weeks of everything building and building until he felt fit to burst, Momma and Peter had both left the house, and the day was pleasant enough for a quick jog in their absence. Paris had nearly been overjoyed, standing and smiling as Momma left with a quick kiss to his cheek and Peter with a spirited wave as he’d run out to the car. Paris had watched them out one of the windows, waiting impatiently for Momma’s car to pull out of the driveway and head down the road, before he’d turned to his room to change, pull on some shoes, and then trotted down the stairs to head out the front door.

He’d made the most of it, leaving the Gallos’ property to push through the front gate to reach the sidewalk on the street beyond. There was no telling how long it would be until he had another chance.

Now Paris could hear the blood rushing through his ears the way he always did when he ran too hard. He could hear the loud thumping of his heart, and his irregular, panting breaths, ripping through a throat that felt too dry and too tight—always too tight. His muscles burned. His feet tingled from their relentless pounding against the pavement. His head felt light. A few spots danced along the edges of his vision, making everything shift and fade.

He headed back into the house only a half an hour after leaving it, stumbling on legs that felt too week. It was a long walk, much longer than it had felt before. He stopped a few times to lean against a tree, fighting for breath as he forced himself onward, unwilling to give in and collapse into a tired heap on the ground.

He made it up the front steps, through the door which shut softly behind him, beyond the foyer and into the living area where he grabbed onto one of the decorative structural columns for support. He felt hot and tingly all over, craving water as much as he craved for air, but the kitchen seemed so far away and his body kept telling him to stop, to rest, to sleep.

He didn’t listen.

Paris paused in the doorway, gripping the frame to keep himself upright for just a little longer, just long enough to get a glass from the cupboard and fill it with water from the tap, but something else stopped him before he could cross to the appropriate cabinet.

Admiral Gallo sat at the counter bar, that day’s newspaper spread out before him with a mug of steaming coffee set close to his hand. Even off-duty he dressed in an immaculate fashion, in pressed slacks and collared shirts, with his face perpetually clean-shaven. The color of his eyes and the short cut of his hair and the lines on his face were the only things to really differentiate him from Chris.

Paris saw him much less than he saw Momma. Admiral Gallo was frequently away, doing whatever it was Admirals did and coming home for infrequent visits before leaving again soon after. Because of his long absences and the subsequent unfamiliarity, and the fact that just the Admiral’s presence was so demanding of respect, it had taken a bit longer than it might have otherwise for Paris to condition himself to call Chris’s father by his name.

Claire was easy because she was sweet and loving and Momma, and even though there were so many things about Beau that reminded him of Chris, there was just as much about him that made Paris wary. Beau was distant and reserved, so in control of himself and the image he projected that Paris was always surprised to see any emotional response from him.

He wasn’t cold—not really. But he wasn’t warm like Momma either.

Paris’s stomach flopped over on itself and plummeted low when Beau raised his eyes to look at him, sharp and blue and too wise to be fooled.

“What are you doing here?” Paris wheezed as he tried to control his breathing, but the more he tried the harder it became.

There wasn’t going to be any pretending now.

“I got in late last night,” Beau explained, and then added, “You were already asleep.”

That was why Momma and Peter had gone out then, why Momma hadn’t seemed too concerned about leaving him alone, because he wasn’t alone at all, and now Beau knew what he’d done because Paris was standing there panting in the doorway, probably looking like death warmed over, and Beau was staring at him like he could see everything—how he ran and picked at his food and could never really sleep, and he hated himself so much in that moment, more than he ever had in his life, and all he wanted was to fade away and never have to deal with any of this ever again.

The heat and the tingling grew stronger. For a moment his vision went dark, and when it returned to him Paris was crouching on the floor with his hands on either side of his head.

He heard the scraping of a chair against the tile as Beau stood up, then footsteps as he drew closer to stand impressively before him.

“What are you doing, Paris?” he asked.

Paris could tell by the tone of his voice that Beau didn’t mean to ask what he was doing on the floor. He meant something more than that, of course.

He couldn’t lie. Not to Beau. Not when Beau could see right through him.

“I don’t know,” Paris said in a broken whisper. “I don’t know anymore.”

It didn’t matter how fast or how far he ran. Maybe it provided him with a temporary escape, but it never lasted. As soon as the fatigue wore off and he returned to his life, everything, all of it came rushing back—the memories and the reminders that nothing would ever be the way it used to be again. It only ever left for minutes, hours if he was lucky, and now that he’d been caught he could only think about how fruitless it all was, because even though it felt so good while he was doing it, once the running was through and he came back to himself he felt even more terrible than he had before.

His eyes stung and flooded over, and he felt so small and so stupid and so worthless, and he didn’t know what to do about it—neither how to fix it nor how to make it better. Every hopeless feeling he’d ever had raged through him and he knew that nothing, not running or dancing and forcing his emotions out by some other means, would ever be enough to make it all go away.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said again, shaking with hunger and fatigue and too many frustrations over too many problems that went without answers.

An arm spread around his shoulders to help him to his feet, an arm that was as strong and steadying as Chris’s, but he knew Chris wasn’t there—just Beau and his piercing eyes that knew too much, and all Paris could do was sag against him and let himself be guided through the house and back up the stairs to his room.

He collapsed onto the bed, curled into himself, cried into his pillow when Beau left and came back with a glass of water and said, “Drink this and get some sleep. I’m calling your mother.”

Paris didn’t have the strength or the will to argue with him.

When his mother came a few hours later, she brought up a bowl of tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a glass of apple juice, and she sat with him while Momma and Beau and Peter stood in the doorway. Paris wept miserably beside her, and she brushed at his hair and kissed his cheek and his forehead and she whispered “It’s okay, Baby… It’s okay… It’s okay…” until he’d eaten every last bite.