Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 22
Sleeping With The Television On

(x) X (x)

Meilan came hurrying down the stairs the moment she heard Duo scream, worried that something had happened to the longhaired mechanic. At first she had lingered on the landing near the bottom of the stairs, staring over the railing at the empty workbench underneath it, wondering where Duo even was. He had definitely been there recently, she deduced as she finished walking down the stairs, looking at the wheel-less skateboard deck half-fitted with a new sheet of grip tape that lay abandoned on the workbench. Just as she was trying to figure out where Duo could have gone, she heard his voice coming from the other side of the basement, where Heero kept his little artist’s nook. He sounded very worked up about something, the loud clopping of his boots echoed on the concrete floor as he made quick, nervous paces. “Duo?” she called out, her voice putting an immediate stop to the pacing.

“Yeah? Meilan?” Duo answered, his voice loud, but somehow weak at the same time. “Quick! Please come here!”

Meilan rushed past the surf boards, getting more and more worried with each step she took. “Oh... shit....” she managed to get out when she finally reached Duo, who was stooped over Heero’s still-comatose body on the floor. She flew to his side and tried shaking him as Duo had done multiple times while he’d been waiting for Meilan to come. “Dammit, he’s out cold,” Meilan stated, earning her a roll of the eyes from Duo. She missed it, looking over at Duo just a second afterwards. “How long has he been like this?” she asked.

“Uhh, two, three minutes?” Duo guessed, looking down at his watch just to check for sure. “I dunno. He was fine, being all asshole-like and Yuy-ish, when all of a sudden, he can’t walk straight and has to hold onto the chair for support,” Duo explained, jerking a thumb in the direction of the swivel chair by the desk. “Next thing I know, he’s fallen over and I don’t know what to do!”

“Jeez, of all times for you to do this,” Meilan muttered to herself, slipping an arm underneath Heero’s neck and hefting him up into a sitting position. His head rolled back, exposing all of his long neck as Meilan held him upright. Duo found himself having to force his eyes to look at Meilan as she spoke to him, a little upset that he had allowed himself to be so distracted by that lovely neck, which seemed to just be begging for a trail of little kisses to wander down it. “Can you carry him?” Meilan was asking Duo, her voice stern and commanding, like she was an expert in this kind of situation. When Duo nodded, she gave him a curt “Good,” and handed the limp body over to Duo, who slid his free arm underneath his charge’s knees and stood up easily.

“God, he’s a heavy little bugger,” Duo grunted as he fixed his grip on Heero with a little toss of the Japanese boy’s corpse-like body. Heero’s head lolled to the side with the movement, causing it to rest against Duo’s shoulder; Duo looked down at his burden, thinking that it made Heero look like an innocent little boy who had just fallen asleep. “Heh, all he needs is the friggin’ teddy bear, and he’d be set,” Duo said drolly as he followed Meilan through the basement and back up into the shop. “You know,” he added, chattering away just to fill the silence, “the guy’s not so bad when he’s like this. Can we keep him knocked out cold forever? I wouldn’t mind him then! I’ll just sit with him and lay a good left hook on him the moment he wakes up--”

He was cut off by Wufei, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. “What’s the... oh....” He walked over towards Duo, shaking his head as he did so. “God, what a pain in the neck he can be,” Wufei said as he helped Duo with his weighty load on the last couple of stairs.

“He can’t help it if he faints!” Meilan snapped at her future husband, sashaying past Duo and him to the back of the store, where a fold-down staircase that Duo had never seen before extended from the ceiling to the floor. She started up the gently sloping steps, pausing on the third one to turn around and ask: “Is the futon rolled out?”

“Yes,” Wufei answered with a sigh, trying to be as short as he could with Meilan. Sometimes the similarities they had really grated on both their nerves. He jerked his head towards the stairs, signaling Duo to help him carry Heero up into the mysterious attic Meilan had just disappeared into.

“I had always wondered if there was another floor to this building,” Duo commented as they slowly progressed up the stairs, Heero stretched out between them. When they got up there, they found themselves in a large, expansive attic space that looked like it had been very well lived in. It was cluttered with a vast collection of various Chinese furnishings and decorations. Folding screens painted with dragons and other images from Chinese lore served as walls to separate different ‘rooms’. Right at the top of the stairs was a low-to-the-ground table made of redwood, with four plump, purple sitting cushions lying on the floor around it. A small kitchenette in the corner was the source of the spicy scent that lingered in the air; the ceiling dripped with multitudes of Chinese paper lanterns in all shapes and sizes, their dim glow illuminating the dark, crowded space.

“It’s by the big bed,” Wufei said to Meilan, who had disappeared to some other part of the attic, hidden behind one of the screens. He was referring to the futon Meilan had asked about earlier. “This way, Maxwell,” he instructed, leading Duo towards the ‘bedroom’ with a tug of Heero’s body.

In the most far-off corner of the room was their destination, a soft, thin, roll-up futon spread out on the floor by a large, low, antique bed with dragons carved all over the ancient frame. It was made as the Chinese traditionally did with the blankets pulled tightly around the mattress and the pillows piled at the foot of the bed. Duo and Wufei laid Heero down on the futon and Meilan threw an embroidered sheet of yellow silk over his body. The whole production kind of reminded Duo’s morbid mind of what a funeral service might be like in China as they prepared the dead body for burial. He grinned widely at the thought, though it was more because of the Chinese part than the dead part, a shocking thing as the ‘dead body’ in question was none other than Heero.

“So what’s with this setup?” Duo asked, gesturing to the room around them. “Who lives here?”

“Dajya,” Meilan said automatically before she realized she had answered in Chinese. “The whole family,” she translated quickly, adding: “Mother and I, that is.” She cast an almost coy expression at Wufei as she went on, “Wufei comes to visit sometimes too. He sleeps on the floor.” Now she was blushing a very deep red colour, which Duo had to admit was very becoming on her roguish face. “It’s good that he insists on the futon, or Mother would make us share the bed.” She shuddered, recast her stony expression and said snidely to Wufei, sounding completely different than she had before, “Which is a good thing too, because you’re the biggest blanket hog ever! You move all over the place when you sleep, and you snore too!”

“How dare you accuse me of such things, woman!” Wufei roared, his hands tightening into fists. Duo smirked, knowing that Wufei would never hit Meilan, even if someone paid him a million dollars and Meilan called him by every hateful name she could think of. Just like he would never tell Meilan that he really didn’t think she was so bad, even for the same price.

“Heh, you two already act like a married couple,” Duo joked. “Why wait until you’re out of school? I can hear the bells chiming already.”

That earned him two pairs of very dirty, black stares, glaring at him with the hate of a thousand angry Chinese dragons. “That’s not funny!” they both shouted at him, unwittingly at the same time. The glares spun around to face each other as the blunder was made.

“Perfect,” Duo grinned, snapping a shot with an imaginary camera. “You’ll be so happy together.”

Things might have gotten brutal after that, and Meilan and Wufei might have ended up with another unconscious body on their hands, had a shrill. thickly-accented voice not interrupted the pounding they were about to land on Duo for his commentary. “Aii-ya! Meimei, you up here?! You come down now! Is customer!”

“Shit!” Meilan swore, jumping up from the big bed, which she had been sitting on cross-legged. She dashed over to the hole in the floor, where the fold-up stairs descended down to the main floor, nearly bowling over a small, round Chinese woman who was coming up. “Ma-a-a,” she moaned as she tried to rush past. “You’re in the way!”

Meilan’s mother sighed as she let her daughter go down the stairs before continuing up. Duo peered around the screen that separated the ‘bedroom’ from the ‘living room’ to get a better look at the dumpy, jovial-looking woman. Her graying black hair was pinned up behind her head with a decorative, little comb and folded in a fanned out bun. She wore a plain red, Chinese shirt with a high collar and black cords that ran horizontally across the middle to fasten it closed. She carried two bags of groceries in each hand and a small, round cage made of wood and mesh wire. The old woman walked out of Duo’s line of sight, disappearing behind another screen, behind which the kitchen was hidden. He could hear her bustling about, putting her groceries away, before she reappeared and started heading towards the bed where he and Wufei were with Heero.

“Aii-ya! Is son-in-law!” she chirped in that way older Chinese women do when they realized they had guests. She started prattling away in Chinese to Wufei for a minute or two before she even realized that Duo and their unconscious charge were even in the room. She stared at Duo for a couple of seconds, as if she was trying to decide whether she knew him or not, before deciding that Duo was indeed someone she had yet to meet. “Is new friend of Meimei, yes?” she asked, jerking the cage she still held in one hand about; Duo was now close enough to see that there was a little, green cricket chirping merrily away in there. “Am Long Yu Hwa,” she introduced herself with a slight bow towards Duo. “Is friend of son-in-law?”

“Uh, yeah,” Duo shrugged with an unsure glance at Wufei, unsure if the Chinese boy could really be considered a friend of his or not. “Meilan too.”

“Ah! Is friends with Meimei too! Is double luck!” the woman exclaimed. “Must be very lucky boy!”

“In a way....” Duo said to her, shifting his eyes to the side.

“What means ‘in a way’?” Yu Hwa asked, kneeling down beside Duo and setting her cricket down between them. It was then that she first noticed Heero lying on the futon beside him. “Is little Suyuan,” she said, her voice sounding grave, quite unlike the cheerful, sunny tone she had just been using. “Is very sick. Is fainting lots more lately.”

“This is a regular thing?” Duo asked, glancing down at Heero with something that was probably pity, but not about to be called so by Duo, who was still hard in his idea that Heero was the Devil.

“Is bad, yes. Meimei tell me that Suyuan get weak with too much stress. Is not enough wood in him,” Yu Hwa answered with a nod of her head. She pushed her cricket closer to the futon. “Now Suyuan is needing good luck more than I is needing it. I find new cricket for bedroom,” she announced, suggesting that the cricket was now Heero’s. She shook her head sadly at Heero, before brightening again, back to the woman who had walked into the room moments before. “Hungry, both of you? Yes?” Not waiting for a yes or a no from either boy, she got to her feet and was already heading for the ‘kitchen’. “I make late lunch for Meimei and friends.” She was off to the kitchen before either of them could thank her.

“What’s with the ‘Suyuan’ thing?” Duo asked when she was gone, referring to Heero with a jerk of his head. He wondered what the hell Meilan’s mother was going on, thinking that Heero was the sort of boy who should have any kind of epithet.

“It’s Chinese,” Wufei answered, stating the obvious part of the question. “It means... ‘long-cherished wish’... sometimes....”

“Sometimes?” Duo wondered aloud. He kept his thoughts about the name to himself though; who would call Heero something like ‘long-cherished wish’?

“It depends how you write it,” Wufei explained, collapsing backwards onto the large dragon bed, sending pillows flying everywhere. He traced the letters in the air as he spoke. “If you write it another way, it still sounds the same, but it means ‘long-held grudge’.”

“Oh,” Duo answered. The other translation made more sense to him. “Obviously that’s the one she means when she calls him that, right?”

“I don’t think so,” Wufei answered. “Amah likes Heero very much, like a nephew or something.”

“Amah...?” Duo wondered aloud. Just stepping into this Chinese household gave him a feeling as if he’d just stumbled upon an entire new world, which, in a sense, it was. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised, though; both Meilan and Wufei seemed to be very proud of their heritage. Maybe that was one thing they could grow closer with.

“It’s just... someone who takes care of the kids, I guess. But it has to be a woman who’s very close to the family or the child.... My clan and the Long clan were always very close, which is why I call Yu Hwa Amah,” Wufei tried to explain, extending his feet high up in the air, stretching out his legs. Duo had never noticed before that Wufei even wore a pair of black Chinese slippers on his feet.

I guess it’s nice he has something like his lineage and blood to hold onto, Duo thought to himself, looking down at his fumbling hands in his lap. I don’t really have anything like that. I mean, I guess I always considered myself an American, but I don’t really know. I wonder where my parents were from... or what even happened to them.... As his thoughts trailed off, his eyes wandered sadly from his hands to Heero, who he was still sitting beside. There was something about the way Heero’s face looked when it was relaxed in sleep like that; something that made him look young and boyish, and almost friendly, and nothing like the bastard Duo had come to know. “Jerk,” he spat down at the still-unconscious Heero, his mere presence, awake or not, annoying to Duo.

“What was that, Maxwell?” Wufei shot back up into a sitting position, glaring at Duo, thinking that Duo had been speaking to him, not Heero.

“Not you,” Duo said. He pointed down at Heero. “That.”

“Why’re you so mean to him?” Wufei asked, his voice suddenly serious, with no trace of anger or petty temper caught up in it. “Maybe if you were easier on him, he’d open up to you more.”

“Oh. Yeah. Like you’re his best friend!” Duo rolled his eyes sarcastically, totally missing the punch. “Why should I be any nicer to him than you, Justice Boy of America?”

“Two reasons,” Wufei responded quickly. “One: I am nice to him, and might even consider him a friend. And any time it comes off I don’t like him is because two, unlike you, I have a reason to be bitter towards him!” He shook his ankle as if it said enough on the matter.

“I do so have reasons!” Duo bellowed. It was surprising that the volume of his voice neither roused the attention of Yu Hwa, nor woke Heero, still dead to the world. Duo started counting off on his fingers; “One: he’s been an asshole to me, so why shouldn’t I be an asshole back? Two: his whole high-and-mighty-Yuy routine drives me up the wall. And most important, three: he’s a goddamned prep!”

“I suppose you dislike me too, then,” Wufei answered smugly, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’ve been told on many occasions, sometimes even by you, that I’m an asshole with a high-and-mighty routine. And I suppose if you had to stash me in one of those superficial cubbyholes, prep is where I’d be. After all,” his voice dropped and a smirk seeded itself on his face, “aren’t only preps on the lacrosse team?”

“That’s damn right!” Duo snapped. He calmed a little bit, adding in a much meeker voice: “Well, the last part is. I don’t really think you’re an asshole.... Just a jerk sometimes, you know?”

“So what about you, Mr. Maxwell?” Wufei’s smirk was nothing short of sadistic now.

“What about me?”

“You’re part of the team too,” he said. “Doesn’t that make you a prep as well?”
“I sure as hell think to God, no!” Duo cried, leaping to his feet with catlike grace. His cheeks were red like twin tomatoes, his eyes wide and bulging like ripe melons. “I didn’t try out! I don’t play the game! I don’t want to be there! I certainly hope that’s not what you tell people, Wufei, because if I found out you did, I’d kill you!”

“I know how to say that in Japanese: omae o korosu,” Wufei grinned lopsidedly, which was actually a somehow strangely endearing and ridiculously frightening sight to see. “Heero taught me some. Has he taught you? How about this one: omae o ai shiteru.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Duo rolled his eyes again. He wondered if his eyes got motion-sickness from all the times he spun them around the whites of his eyeballs.

“Shh! It’s a secret, and I’m not supposed to tell,” Wufei replied in a maliciously frank tone. “You’ll just have to wait ‘till he teaches you now, won’t you?” He blew a kiss at Duo, though whether it was a challenge or a taunt, Duo wasn’t sure.

“If it means ‘fuck you’ or something, I bet he’s said it to me a million times!” Duo snapped, never one to let anyone else have the last word. He didn’t like the way Wufei, and all his other friends, for that matter, had this horrible way of making him feel so damn small.

“Close enough,” Wufei shrugged, muttering low under his breath. Duo had to strain his ears to even catch it, and when he heard, he wasn’t quite sure if he had heard it right.

“What is it with all of his stupid friends! Does he teach you all Japanese so you can whisper about me in front of my face!?” Duo asked, still determined not to lose this battle of wit and words. For a ‘prep’, Wufei wasn’t faring too badly.

“Actually, Heero speaks many languages,” Wufei said frankly. “But he told me once it makes him feel more one with his Eastern blood when he uses Japanese. He says he feels alienated from his culture sometimes.”

“Smarter than the average sucker, isn’t he?” Duo murmured sardonically down at Heero, who just responded with sleepy indifference.

“Highly,” Wufei said, standing up and reaching high over his head with a loud yawn. “I’m going to go see how Amah is doing with the food, okay?” he informed Duo as he started towards the clanking noises and the aromatic scents wafting from the kitchen.

Duo watched him go and then turned his attention to the area around him with a sigh. He didn’t really know how to cook, certainly not Chinese food, so there really wasn’t much he could do to help. The only Chinese he’d had at home was either microwaveable or the take-out stuff that dripped with grease and MSG. Lying down on his back, he stared up at the sloping ceiling, early twilight shining through the small skylights above, mingling with the soft glow of all the Chinese lanterns glowing like multicoloured fireflies all around him.

Turning his head to the side, he found that he was lined up evenly with Heero. For a moment, Duo was captivated by Heero’s finely chiseled profile, noticing for the first time how Heero’s build was almost delicate and feminine. His eyelashes were long and dusted the tops of his high cheekbones with his closed eyes, his small, pouting lips parted slightly. “You look... almost gentle....” Duo whispered to Heero, reaching over with one finger to trace that tempting profile, just because he had the chance to touch Heero and not get pulverized. “Too bad you’re so cold when you’re awake,” he said as his fingers ghosted over Heero’s lips, dancing down his chin. He laughed quietly to himself a little. “Bet you’d strangle me if you woke up and caught me touching you.” A yawn distorted his last couple words. “Then again, I think I’d probably strangle myself before you got a chance; you’re not supposed to know I think you’re... beautiful....” Duo pawed the floor underneath him, yawning again; “Mm, comfy rug....”

When Wufei came back to the bedroom to get Duo for dinner, he found the longhaired mechanic curled up in a loose ball on the floor, where he had fallen asleep next to Heero, the lucky cricket chirping away merrily amid his quiet snores.

(x) X (x)

“For the millionth time, Relena, no!” Milliardo said, a sigh riddling his annoyance. “I won’t print something like that!”

“Oh come on, Milliardo!” Relena protested against her older brother, brandishing a stapled packet at him desperately. “You’re encroaching on freedom of speech and freedom of the press! It’s my right to have it printed!”

“Relena, let’s rewind for a second,” Milliardo said, calming his voice somewhat. He pointed to himself and said in a slow, concise voice, like he was talking to a small child, “I am the editor of The Peacemillion, meaning I get to decide what is printed in the paper and what is not.” His brows fused together over his nose and his crystalline eyes became cold like iced blue diamonds as he glared at his sister. “And I refuse to print an article about how quarantining mutants on the Winner Corporation’s new space colonies is better for mankind! I think it’s discriminatory!”

Finished with the silly argument, he spun his chair around and rolled over to Walker’s empty desk, the assistant editor visible in the computer lab through the window set above it, working diligently. Relena held her position in the door of the small office space in the back of the school’s computer lab where Milliardo and Walker set up shop. The two chiefs of the school’s monthly newspaper, The Peacemillion, were staking it out late to finish up the completed version for the printing deadline the next day, and Relena had hoped to weasel in an article she’d typed up over the course of the past week that implored help in her newfound anti-mutant cause.

The computer lab seemed eerily quiet, the long brown tables set with futuristic-looking Macs empty and looking quite ghostly in the weak light cast by only a few turned-on computers surrounding Walker and two desk lamps sitting on Milliardo’s desk in the office, shining through the window and spilling into the otherwise black computer room. Milliardo bent over Walker’s desk, scribbling furiously on another column that was meant to be in the paper and needed a last-minute edit before he handed it over to Walker for finalization. His pen screeched across the page with extra flourish, his hand taking out his frustrations against his persistently annoying sister on the paper.

“But Ze-echs,” she whined, using his childhood nickname in an effort to pull him her way. “You’ll print that... that Catalonia girl’s article on gay unions, but not mine on the mutant issue! You can’t avoid it, Zechs!” she complained, trying to sound authoritative. “The mutant issue isn’t a problem that’s going to go away! There’s been a big rise in mutant hate crimes lately! Don’t you think that it would be better for everyone if they could just separate the two!? Then everyone would be able to live in peace!”

Milliardo turned around to look at his sister, who actually looked somewhat earnest in her cause. He sighed and tried to explain his reasoning: “Look, ‘Lena, that’s a nice thought, but I can’t help but think that the whole thing just sounds a little... biased... not to mention naive. Besides, Dorothy’s article on gay unions is talking about something that’s really being fought about all over the place! You’re bringing up a totally moot point to stir up trouble!”

“She’s being biased too, I bet!” Relena argued, her fingers crumpling around the roll of paper in her hand. “Why won’t you print mine? You like Dorothy Catalonia better!” Her lips quivered a bit, like she was about to cry.

“Don’t you try that fake cry on me, Miss Relena Darlian-Peacecraft,” Milliardo said sharply, shuddering a little bit to hook his own surname at the end of hers. “I’ve made my decision. Besides, you’re too late for the deadline. If you wanted even a ghost of a chance, you should have turned it in before the deadline, just like everybody else. Just because you’re the president of the school doesn’t mean you get the power to make the whole damn place bend because you have some ulterior motive.”

“Motive! How could you say something like that!” she cried, throwing her arms up over her head.

“Because I can’t help but think like you’ve got something up your sleeve,” Milliardo answered frankly. “Since when did you care about political issues? You never used to! Makeup and boys were about where your world ended. What does it matter to you if we live here or in space? Maybe if it turns out that we do better in space than regular humans do, then fine, maybe mutants will live in space! But right now, it’s not a big deal!” He spun his chair around again and went back to his editing.

That was it; he had touched something taboo. Relena had warned Milliardo specifically to never bring up the fact that he was a mutant unless she approved of it. And now he had just overstepped that line. “Don’t ever talk about it like you’re some better race,” she growled, her voice not very frightening, but full of spite nonetheless. “I hate it when you make yourself out to be some kind of god when you’re really just some freakish mistake of nature!”

“The hell do you think you are!?” Milliardo snapped, not even bothering to turn around this time. “Humans were a mutation in some ape’s genetic code! How d’ya like that one, Miss Queen of the World!?”

“You all should be off in space! I hate you all!” Relena crowed, her anger towards her brother coming out to bite venomously.

“Whoa, where did that come from?” Milliardo asked, actually peering over his shoulder to see what his sister’s expression was. She looked a little psychotic, to tell the honest truth. He knew she had never been a fan of his mutation, but he had never labeled her as one of those extremist types. He wondered where this sudden urge to separate man and mutant had come from. “I’m sorry if you think that my not wanting to print your silly little article has something to do with my mutation. I don’t know where you’re coming from, ‘Lena, and quite frankly, you sound kind of hypocritical saying all these things. I personally think I’m saving you from quite a bit of embarrassment.”

“Shut up, Milliardo!” Relena huffed as she stomped out of the office, not caring that Milliardo wasn’t even getting up to follow her. So what if he doesn’t want to print it in his stupid paper! she thought bitterly to herself as she stalked out of the computer lab and towards the school’s exit. I’ve got my own ways of spreading word. I’ll get rid of those horrible mutants who claw at the rest of us normal people if it’s the last thing I do! I’ll help Solo bring that Doctor J that wretched Duo who had his hands all over my Heero! I’ll do it, I swear it!

(x) X (x)

Duo woke up the next morning to find himself lying in the middle of an unfamiliar floor. He spent a few seconds staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out where he was, memories of the afternoon before slowly beginning to trickle through his brain. He sat up, a yellow blanket he didn’t remember covering himself with tumbling off his body as he did so. Looking around, he found the large bed in the corner empty and made, the huge mountain of Chinese pillows looming up against the headboard. With a quick downward glance, he noticed that the futon Heero had been laid out on was gone, as was said Japanese boy. “I guess he must have come to,” Duo said to himself, taking a look at his watch to see how late it was. “Jesus, I must have been conked out! It’s almost 10:30!”

He got up and folded the golden-yellow, silk blanket and laid it gingerly on the bed, his mind jotting down a note that it had been the same blanket they’d used to cover Heero with. Being the constantly-hungry devil that he was, he followed the scents of spicy food coming from the kitchen section of Meilan’s home, only mildly surprised to find Wufei standing at the counter, a steaming pot of boiling water on the little stove next to him.

“What’cha makin’?” Duo chirped, bouncing over to the counter to peer over Wufei’s shoulder.

“Wontons,” he answered, for once not acting like he was the master of the universe.

“Cool,” Duo grinned, watching as Wufei easily smeared a sticky glob of meat onto a small patch of noodly dough with a pair of long chopsticks and then effortlessly pinched the dough into a little pillow.

“Want to help?” Wufei asked after a few moments of silence.

“Nope,” Duo replied, still entranced by Wufei’s gracefully quick culinary skills. “Just to chow down when you’re finished,” he laughed, waiting for Wufei to fume at him.

“Then away with you!” Wufei snapped, stabbing at Duo with his chopsticks, which was enough to make Duo leap back a few paces and was surprisingly also enough to keep Wufei content.

“What happened to Yuy?” Duo asked, trying to make himself sound as unsuspicious as possible. He knew that Wufei would probably rush him to the hospital if he made a query about Heero’s whereabouts sound too imploring. To be perfectly honest, Duo felt like he really owed Heero a thank you for saving him from White Fang that one night a couple days before.

“He came around about six hours ago,” Wufei answered as he took his tray of finished wontons and dumped them into the steamer. When he was through, Wufei turned around and smirked darkly at Duo. “Why, is there any particular reason you might be looking for him?”

“No!” Duo answered a little too quickly, the word drowning out the last few that Wufei had said. “Just curious is all!” he added as a feeble explanation with a moody little pout.

“What, curious as to why you ended up with his blanket on top of you?” Wufei prodded. If anyone had been asking Duo, he would have said that Wufei’s smirk was just short of being sadistically cruel. “What do you want me to tell you? That he kissed you while you were sleeping too?” He chuckled evilly.

“What are you talking about?” Duo demanded, suddenly not liking where this conversation had turned.

“Never mind,” Wufei shook his head in an exasperated fashion, turning back to his cooking. Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, he directed Duo to Heero’s location. “Last I saw him, he was out banging a lacrosse ball against the side of the shop.”

“Typical,” Duo responded, bobbing his head from side to side, trying to kill time so it wouldn’t seem so weird when he went around to that exact place in search of the bane of his existence. It didn’t work; Duo was jogging down the stairs five minutes later, deciding that he had better get the whole thing over and out of his system before it left him by some other means.

Duo found Heero exactly where Wufei said he would, tossing a lacrosse ball against the wall on the street that ran up to the boardwalk between Meilan’s shop and the junky dollar store across the way. Duo watched Heero for a second, gathering his nerve and swallowing his pride, as the Japanese boy flung the small, hard, red ball against the off-white siding of Nataku’s and then easily snagged it with his lacrosse stick on the return trip.

BADOOM! The ball smacked against the wall and flew back towards Heero. BADOOM! BADOOM!

Duo took a step forward, still not believing that he was actually going to go through with this crazy, half-brained idea. Heero seemed to not have noticed him, still more focused on catching his ball. Duo couldn’t help but think to himself that Heero really was very good at the game, far better than he could have ever hoped to have been. Maybe it wasn’t such a silly talent after all.

BADOOM!

Duo was about to open his mouth to speak, but found himself somewhat distracted by Heero’s lean form. He had never seen Heero play without being hidden beneath all those pads, and the sight of the lithe, quick-footed boy moving so gracefully, muscles rippling underneath his black tee-shirt. Though he’d noticed it many times before, Duo was always dumbfounded by just how good-looking Heero actually was. He remembered back to that first time they’d met, the complete shock he’d been in when Heero had taken off his helmet and Duo had been able to get his first real look at that gorgeous face. He was just like a Botecelli angel: beautiful and cold, emotionless as a painted canvas.

BADOOM!

“Heero?” Duo finally got it together enough to say, descending the small flight of stairs to the sidewalk. “Can we talk?”

Heero froze, his arms poised like he was about to throw the ball again. Slowly, his head turned towards the speaker, his ears refusing to believe that it was Duo voluntarily seeking him out until he had visual proof. “Duo?” he said, still surprised, even after he found that it really was Duo. “What do you want?”

“What do I... want...?” For a second, Duo had to actually think about the question, finding that he had let Heero’s devastatingly good looks distract him a bit too much.

“Well?” Heero pressed, his arms rising up a bit, as if he were giving Duo only a few seconds to spill it before he went back to his practice, and that it had better be good.

“I just wanted to say....” Suddenly, Duo was wondering why he had ever thought this was such a good idea.

“What?” Heero’s intense blue eyes seemed to fluctuate as he glared long and hard at the longhaired boy standing flustered by the steps of the boardwalk. “Are you just going to stand there and blink at me, or did you have something to tell me?” He lifted his arms a little more again, threatening that Duo had until he threw his ball again, and once he did, his attention was gone.

“Um....” Duo hesitated a moment more before finally spilling out: “ThanksforhelpingmewithWhiteFang!”

Heero arched one eyebrow, his stick falling loosely to one side as he stared at Duo sideways. “What was that?” Strangely enough, his tone wasn’t sarcastic or condescending, as Duo had expected it to be.

“I just... I just wanted to thank you for the other day,” Duo mumbled, finding it much harder to slow down and articulate than spill it out so fast. He had expected to have hightailed it out of there by that point, and he was amazed that his feet had actually stayed cemented in place. “When you... when you came and beat the crap out of... Solo and all of them....”

“Did you... just thank me? Who are you and what did you do with the real Duo Maxwell?” Heero wondered suspiciously, taking a few steps towards Duo. He was glaring hard at Duo again, but it wasn’t the intimidating one he used to frighten people when he was in a bad mood. Rather, he just looked very weirded out, and a little frightened. Before Duo had even realized it, Heero was standing in front of him, slowly reaching forward with tentative fingers that he slipped underneath Duo’s bangs to feel his forehead. “Are you... sick or something?”

The skin on Duo’s forehead was growing warm and alive with a tingly sensation that threatened to have him coming apart at the atom. Whenever Duo was frightened or excited, or worse yet, a mixture of both, he was far more susceptible to losing control over his mutation. He was coming so close to doing so at the moment, it was a miracle Duo hadn’t revealed his secret gift in front of the other boy yet. Heero had never touched him like this before, the very idea just short of sending the blood rushing backwards through his arteries. To say the least, Duo was shocked that Heero hadn’t decked him yet. “Uhh...” Duo let out intelligently.

“You’re burning up, you know that?” Heero said, his arched brow now furrowing with something that Duo would have labeled as worry had he seen it one anyone else’s face. Heero scrutinized Duo’s face closer, like he was trying to find some disease written across it in plain letters. “Are you sure you’re okay? Your face is red too.”

“It is not!” Duo denied almost instantaneously. He knew for a fact that the red colour tingeing his cheeks was a good, old-fashioned blush, not a mysterious disease, though perhaps a blush caused by Heero could be very well considered one. “I’m not sick,” Duo ground out defensively, taking a few quick shuffles backwards and pulling himself free of Heero’s dangerously comfortable fingers.

“You sure?” Heero asked, cocking his head to the side. “You sure are acting strangely.”

I just wanted to say ‘thanks’, okay!? I felt like I owed you at least that much for what you did for me!” Duo shouted, his shields sliding into place automatically. “Is there something wrong with that!?”

“No, nothing wrong,” Heero answered, shaking his head. “I just wish...” he started, stepping towards Duo, his hand stretched out again. Duo cringed back a little, trying to escape Heero’s long, slim fingers as they reached for him, just brushing Duo’s round cheek as the longhaired boy tried to wrench himself further away.

“Don’t,” he mumbled, for some reason feeling like he needed to explain himself to Heero, which was ridiculous, as he’d never felt that urge before. He started toying with the tail of his braid as he often did when he was on edge and needed to focus on something lest he unwillingly mutate. Much to his horror, his fiddling was so rapid and jittery, he accidentally snapped the rubber band that tied his braid off, causing it to slowly unravel. It was all he could to quickly grab at it with both hands, frantically holding it so that he wouldn’t find himself standing with his hair down in Heero’s presence; he would have rather streaked through the halls of the school instead of letting anyone see his hair unbraided.

Heero seemed a little more nervous when Duo recoiled away from his grasp. He dropped his lacrosse stick to the ground and knelt, tugging at the shoelace of one of his tattered, yellow sneakers, refusing to look up into Duo’s eyes until he was finished. Before Duo had a chance to get away though, Heero quickly closed the gap between them again, grabbing Duo’s braid out of his protesting hands.

“Hey!” Duo was not happy about this. Not only was Heero touching his precious hair, threatening to let it all fall loose, but he was stuck and unable to get away with said hair in Heero’s possession. But what Heero did next did nothing short of surprising Duo beyond coherent speech or thoughts.

“I should greatly like for us to be friends,” Heero said softly, opening one hand to reveal a worn shoelace from one of his beat-up sneakers, which he then used to retie Duo’s hair at the bottom of where it was still plaited, about six-inches up from where the original rubber band had been. Then, as soon as the shoelace was knotted off in a simple, floppy bow, Heero let Duo’s hair go, stooped to pick up his discarded lacrosse stick, and quickly walked up to the boardwalk, just like that.

(x) X (x)

a/n: The title of this chappy is a Billy Joel song. (Billy Joel rocks my socks ^^) Oh, and sorry if Meilan’s mother turned into big, fat rip-off of just about every mother in the book The Joy-Luck Club and Cologne from Ranma 1/2, but that’s just kind of what happened. Meh, I’m weird that way. And hey! Did you know I got fanart for this a while ago!? Go check my website for the nifty pic of Heero that Chiya did for me! (*glares at all of you to start drawing*)

So, as for Heero and Duo, they’re getting a bit sweeter on each other, ne? I really hope this keeps your interest and you all stay tuned, despite it’s slow pace. Then again, I guess you all really don’t have anything to read, do you!? Over 1000 reviews!? (Not that I’m complaining, of course!!) But man! Wow.

...Silence....

THANK YOU!!!!