Notes: I'll probably call this part one and the next part two. Rather than stress over finishing the chapter as I had planned it, I decided to bake cookies and get some extra sleep. I figure temporarily-short is better than late.
Moments of Haven Part 116
Watering Hole Part 1
Duo chuckled in the middle of writing his report as the details reminded him of something. "Geez, I still can't believe Andrei pulled one over Garrison like that."
"I know. I've heard."
If Heero had been within reach, he would have received a tap of some sort. "This is due diligence, man. I gotta think back over the game before I can write up my notes on it, right?"
"If you say so."
The occasional niche with seating scattered around the office was better suited to waiting than working. If Duo hadn't finally achieved an optimal sprawl across his bench where he could balance his laptop comfortably, he'd have taken steps to put Heero within his reach. Fortunately, words made good long range projectiles. "You're just sad you lost."
"Not by much."
"Losing's losing, Yuy."
"I'll bet you double or nothing I finish my final remarks before you do."
Duo tilted his head just enough to see his partner, who sat correctly on a bench perpendicular to his. He judged the humor hovering in the corner of those lips and decided the bet was serious, if in good humor. "No deal. I mean, I could totally win that one, but I might forget to dot one of my i's, and then where would my class be, hm?"
"Are you filling out the right paperwork? Mine's not nearly so absurd."
"Absurd? Nah, not really, not compared to some of the other paperwork we've had to do in our time. It's useful, this stuff. It's just... like, I know what I think about each of them, I just have to figure out how to fit it all into words. Words that are appropriate for a report like this."
"Just get yourself into the right frame of mind and the rest will fall into place. Think of it as improvising your way through the vocabulary of a report, and I'm sure you'll do fine."
"Oh, ha. Funny. Was that your attempt at improvising a joke?"
"Was that your attempt at improvising a comeback?"
Good one. Not that he would admit it. "Really? You're just going to recycle my line?"
Heero shrugged. "Improvising is about working with the tools at hand, isn't it?"
He couldn't help the small chuckle that escaped him. "Okay, fine, I'll let you have this one. But only because you lost earlier."
"Barely."
Duo drew breath to retort, but then decided against it. They could go on all day like this, and they really did have work to finish up. Though Heero had barely stopped typing to respond. He let it go with a shake of his head and continued writing up his observations. Once he got into the rhythm of things again, he found himself almost done before he knew it. Sort of like the class itself. He glanced back to Heero and saw him reading over his report. "Come on, tell me the truth, now that it's all over. Did you really think you had something to teach? I mean, not that you aren't bloody good at what you do, but... you know what I mean."
Heero meditated on the answer as he closed out one more student file. "I... surprised myself. They surprised me. I was not confident in my ability to engage them. I have had many teachers over the years, but none of them seemed to have a style of teaching appropriate for this setting that I could emulate."
Duo thought back over his own teachers. Many of his lessons had been learned the hard way on the streets, but many more had been learned at a distance, watching others make the mistakes. He prided himself on that. "You really think anyone would be stupid enough to get rowdy in your class?"
"Rowdy?"
"Yeah, you know... like Rick the Dick was sometimes, way back when."
Heero made an amused sound. "He was certainly stupid enough to get rowdy in our presence, so I suppose it is possible. But these people are Preventers agents and adults. I hope that if they were rowdy, they would at least be rowdy in a less juvenile way."
"True." In their final days at that school, they had taken steps to make sure there would be no further confrontations with the boy. Neither of them had been willing to risk something going wrong when they were so close to the end. "But you had that one guy..."
"He wasn't rowdy," Heero responded firmly. "He was... justifiably suspicious."
Duo kept his eye-rolling to a minimum. "Okay, fine, but did you think you'd get a whole class full of justifiably suspicious people?"
"...Perhaps."
"You didn't think you could un-suspicionify them?"
"People think what they think. Sometimes we can do little to change that."
"You're gloomy sometimes."
Heero's smile was brief. "People think what they think. Myself included."
The gloominess wasn't anything he didn't know about when he'd gotten into this, so he couldn't complain. It was as endearing as it was frustrating, and altogether just one more thing that kept him on his toes. "Well, now that you've managed to change their minds... You all proud of yourself yet? Think you could do it again? Maybe you're not as unengaging as you thought?"
The answering smile was once again short-lived, but still an improvement upon the last. "I think I'm as unengaging as I thought. They just happened to be more easily engaged than I expected them to be."
"Ha. Stubborn ass. Writing any of this on your self-eval?"
"No."
"Good boy."
"And you?"
Duo exhaled audibly, but it was more contemplative than not. "I think I had the advantage. That's just what the class was about. Like, even if they all thought I was just a snot-nosed little kid, they'd still be able to learn something from me. Even if it was just from figuring out how a snot-nosed little kid like me ended up teaching a Preventers seminar. Even if they all ended up hating my guts by the end of class, I was pretty sure I could at least make them hate me enough that they'd improvise some mean pranks to play on me or something."
Heero quirked an eyebrow at him. "You don't think that's gloomy?"
'Cynical' was the word he preferred. Whether or not that was any better was open to debate. "...Well, no one ever said we were totally one hundred percent different, yanno. No, wait, actually, I'm pretty sure someone did say that some time."
"I think you're probably right."
He smirked brightly. "Hey, even snowflakes are all made out of the same ol' H-two-O."
Heero snorted in response.
TBC...
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