Moments in a Dorm Room Part 14
Option C
Two people, solitary by nature, were nevertheless sitting together at the table in the dining hall. Their dinners were munched on without relish in silent company. There was, strictly speaking, no particular reason at all for them to be at the same table, other than, ironically, their mutual desire for privacy. Dining hall etiquette dictated that a table occupied by a party not be invaded by strangers uninvited, minus a few exceptions: that the hall was full, that the hall was otherwise empty, that the invaders were uncouth fiends, that the stranger was trying to make new acquaintance.
There was safety to be had in numbers. People occasionally turned a pitying eye toward a table with but one occupant. Two were left alone.
Especially these two. Wufei had arrived at the table before his companion, and thus his dinner was finished first. He lingered afterward, perhaps for an unadmittable desire for company, perhaps to watch his comrade's back. Perhaps even something so mundane as the beginning of a pleasantly mind-numbing food coma. A passing of the guard came soon enough, however, with Duo's approach. Wufei nodded his greeting and farewell and departed, and Duo slid smoothly into the seat next to his.
"Burger, Yuy?" he said by way of salutation to his new tablemate. "Unusual meal for you."
"Did you see our other choices?" Heero was no great connoisseur of foodstuffs, but he had certain practical standards.
"I saw," Duo answered, arranging the fixings on his own burger. "Couldn't tell you what I saw, though. Which, I suspect, is the problem."
Heero snorted in affirmation. "At least I know what is in my burger." It wasn't a particularly great burger, but it served its purpose.
"But you didn't cook it yourself. How can you trust it?"
Sometimes, things were out of one's control. Certain security measures had to be sacrificed for the sake of blending in to a normal society. "They may wish to poison us, but I doubt they would be willing to poison the entire student body in order to do so."
"Food poisoning, maybe. Not enough to kill us, but maybe enough to make us waste the night in the bathroom. An insidious plan, indeed. I guess if we're too busy puking our guts out, we're too busy to make any trouble."
Heero might have contributed a thought or two, but he spied someone over Duo's shoulder on an approach path. "On your four," he murmured from behind his bun.
Duo was ready for it when a foot 'tripped' over the leg of his chair. "Well, if it isn't the girly-man," Rick's voice sneered above his head.
He rolled his eyes and turned partially in his chair. "Oh, come on. What is this, grade school? Back then, sure, maybe only girls had long hair, but honestly, this is high school, man. I'd hope your horizons would have broadened by now. Maybe I'm just too damned lazy to get a haircut. Or I could be a goth, or a punk, or a gamer geek. A good ol' fashioned rebel, or even a goddamn fairy. Can't we get a little more advanced than 'girly-man'?"
Rick blinked and worked his jaw for a bit, trying to formulate a response to that. Fortunately for him, he was saved by one of his comrades calling out to him. "Yeah, man!" he called back, and with a glare and another kick, he retreated from the field.
With a disdainful sound, Duo shook his head and plucked a french fry from his plate before taking a bite from his burger. "Some people," he complained after swallowing.
"I could almost admire his persistence," Heero offered magnanimously. "The way he keeps coming back for more, no matter how many times he gets beat down."
"Heh, sounds like we're the bullies, and he's the defiant wimp. Nah, he's just gotta save face."
Heero swept his gaze over the half-filled dining hall. "These people continue to confound me on occasion."
"I'm glad of it, man. I think I'd get scared if we started being able to understand all of these losers all the time. Overexposure, you know? Just hoping it's not contagious."
They applied themselves to their meals for a minute of companionable silence before Heero asked for the clarification he needed to further unconfound his roommate. "Fairy?"
Duo puzzled over the random query before its meaning finally became clear to him. "Yeah. Not like, 'fairy with wings', you know. 'Fairy' as in 'gay'. And not the happy kind."
Heero threw him a withering look. He knew at least that much of colloquialisms, thank you very much. "Do homosexuals often sport long hair?" His thoughts turned inevitably to his nemesis, Zechs. The Lightning Count had not struck him as lacking in any masculinity.
"How the hell should I know? That's probably some stupid stereotype. I mean, long hair isn't very stylin' these days, anyway."
His brow rose. "Isn't that just another part of the stereotype?"
"What, that gay guys have good fashion sense?" Duo shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe they're the only guys man enough to admit it."
Absently pushing his fruit cocktail around it its little bowl with his fork, Heero pondered that for a while before he exhaled sharply in the sound that passed for a laugh from him. "Maybe Rick's gay and compensating."
His roommate paused, then laughed around a mouthful of bread and meat. He took a moment to swallow first before continuing. "Heh. I like that. And if I really didn't give a piss, maybe I'd actually tell him that to his face, just to see how many different shades of red he can turn."
"And what exactly is 'give a piss' supposed to mean?" Heero asked, well able to derive the term's usage on his own, but suddenly noticing that he had been somewhat derelict in his grammarian duties.
"Meh, piss off, Yuy," Duo retorted without rancor, thereby accepting the notice. "And the government can piss off, while we're at it, too. And Rick and all the guys like him. And--"
"You'd better stop there," Heero advised dryly.
He made an ungentlemanly sound and popped another steak fry into his mouth. They were mushy, tonight, but at least they were tasty. "Where's your sense of adventure?"
"It knows what's good for it." Things like staying away from the unidentifiable foods, for instance.
"Bleh, playing it safe? It's unlike you." He tossed it out as an offhand jab, but there was a level of intentness beneath it.
Heero gave him a measuring look before answering. "If you rock the boat, it's considered a character flaw. They shake their heads and throw their hands up in exasperation. If I rock the boat, it's considered a relapse into psychosis. They flail their arms around wildly before deciding to lock me up and never let me see the light of day again."
Duo blinked in thought. "Well, shit. That kinda puts a damper on things."
His roommate snorted and continued to snipe at his fruit.
Two more fries were consumed in the meantime. "They really think that?" he asked, covering the sobriety with a nonchalant curiosity.
Heero hung his fork on the edge of his empty dessert bowl with a deliberately ponderous care. "I think it would depend on how hard I rocked the boat."
Such a conversation was perhaps better suited to the privacy of their own room. Feeling the presence of everyone around them most keenly, Duo finished the last bite of his burger before responding, trying to reinforce the image of just two guys talking over dinner. "You really got the shitty end of the stick with this whole Zero deal, didn't you?"
The cheap plastic cup of water on Heero's side of the table was turned around contemplatively, first one way, then the other. "I think Earth would have gotten an even shittier end of the stick if I hadn't... grabbed it first." His eyes turned from the cup to his roommate. "All of us."
"All of us, rolling around in shit and loving it, huh?" Duo grinned lopsidedly as he lifted his own cup of water.
"Refusing to take a bath." Heero also hefted his glass.
"Even when they run it for us, and dump all sorts of girly things in to make it smell nice." With eye contact over the rims, they drank together in a silent toast. Duo let out a sigh of amusement. "We really are idiots, aren't we?"
Heero decided not to answer on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. The record would reflect, however, that he had never denied such a thing.
Duo picked up his apple and twisted off the stem. "So I've been upgraded to 'character flaw', ya think?"
Not much of an upgrade. "I think I've given them the impression that it's a... 'personality quirk' rather than rebellion."
The shrinks were looking to turn them again, were they? He felt funny knowing that Heero was reciprocating the cover. Heero was the kind of guy that could go either way on that sort of thing. "And so their focus has shifted on to you, eh? Well, you'll probably do better with it than I did." He made a sour face that had nothing to do with the tartness of his apple. "Just us two, you think? Or do they have such low opinions of the others as well?"
The analysts had, perhaps, matched them wisely as roommates, difficult as it was to admit. "Although I believe they were recently questioning their decision to place Chang in the single room, Winner and Barton appear to be flying underneath the radar well enough."
"I like the guy and all, but you know, as psychotic breaks go..."
"But his did not occur while disconnected from the system. He did not suffer any lingering effects. He was and continues to be very repentant after the fact."
Yes, but his psychotic break really was a psychotic break, whereas Heero's little break had seemed a little more... like a chemical imbalance. Where the docs got off thinking he was going to go Zero at any moment, he didn't know. That stick got shittier, every time he looked at it. "Hn, are you sure you didn't get a look at our files?"
"Like you, I am perfectly capable of figuring out their opinions based on their patterns of questioning."
"Meh, those files probably don't contain anything that we don't already know, anyway. You'd think it was just common sense that we're always going to be 'different', no matter how much they try to socialize us."
Heero made a vaguely nostalgic, faintly cynical sound. "'Different'... now there's something I've been hearing for a while."
Duo snorted in grim amusement. "They tell you that when you were a kid?"
"Aa... We were just 'different'. It was the best explanation for why... we lived the way we did."
"Ch', don't I just know it. 'It's just different out here, kiddo. Get over it and get on with just survivin'...'" There was a faraway look in his eye for a moment. "Better than the real reasons we were there, I guess. 'Course, pretty much all the reasons suck, don't they?"
"Some things just are, without rhyme or reason."
"Those things suck the most, sometimes. Bleh. Reminds me of that stupid research paper we're supposed to write. Us, of all people! On the one hand, I can do the stupid research paper, end up writing something wildly inappropriate and subversive, and then get a bad grade and a frown from the establishment.... or I can choose to avoid confrontation by not doing the stupid research paper, and then getting a bad grade and a frown from the establishment. Which of these two options do you think would be better? In terms of sticking it to the government folks, I think both are equally acceptable for a guy in my position. Not doing it, of course, would be easier, but then, it would also make me look lazy. Which I guess is fine, relatively speaking, if the stupid establishment thinks that's the reason I don't want to write their stupid paper. Then again, I don't know which one they would think is worse: laziness, or rebellion. They're both chronic conditions, but I can put up with their crap about me not rebelling. I don't know if I could take it if they started preaching to me about the value of hard work."
Heero didn't really have to put too much thought into his answer. "What's option C?"
"...I'm working on it." He was tired of Heero coming up with all the good ideas to simultaneously rebel against the government, comply with the government, and not lose one's sense of self.
"Well, at least you're not procrastinating." The paper wasn't due for another month.
"Hn. It's been easy to give 'em what they want so far, but there's no way I can write them a politically correct paper on the sociopolitical conditions during the early years of the Federation."
"We can choose any topic we like. Just don't choose an inflammatory one. Or one you feel strongly about."
Easier said than done, perhaps. "Uh-huh. And if there were something out there that wasn't inflammatory to someone like us, or something that we didn't feel strongly about, then we wouldn't have been out there. At least, I would hope so. I'd hate to find you were out there just because."
Heero favored him with a cold glare, an honor that had in recent days decreased in frequency. "Do not question my dedication to the cause."
And just what did he think he was still dedicated to? "Hey, I didn't say anything of the sort. You wouldn't be much of a Heero Yuy if you weren't dedicated... Hm. Now there's an idea. Meh, but that's no fun at all. Everyone knows about Heero Yuy. The colony rep, that is."
Yuy put aside his lingering chilliness, knowing full well that it would just bounce off of Maxwell now that he had switched to another train of thought. "Not here, they don't. You'll find a disturbing lack of information on him in the public nets these days, both planetside and colony." He'd looked, of course. He had a somewhat personal interest in the man.
"Really...," Duo drawled, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "Woulda thought he'd still be haunting the colony DBs, at least."
"Not when a totalitarian government decides that they'd rather forget he ever existed. We may not be living underneath that totalitarian government anymore, but that information won't be fast in coming back."
"Hmmm." He looked at the idea for a little while longer before setting it on the back burner to simmer. "Say, you gonna stick with that name?"
It took Heero a moment or three to comprehend his meaning, and then a few more to put together an answer in the form of a shrug. "It's mine, now."
"Heh, you aren't in the record books, either. Good thing, I guess. Could get confusing."
"Hn. I'll leave the limelight to him."
OWARI
Back to Jei's Fanfictions Page