Moments of Haven Part 66
Know Thine Enemy

Duo hadn't heard the front door open over the sound of running water, but by the time Heero was padding down the hallway, Duo was aware of the other's presence. "Hey," he called out, and then Yuy materialized within the frame of the door.

"Hey," Heero answered softly, the informality rolling shyly off his tongue.

"I just got home myself. What have you been up to? You've got dust in your hair."

"Hm?" He joined Duo beside the sink, taking a moment to plant a kiss upon his best friend's temple before peering at his image in the mirror. Following Duo's directions, he fluffed the dustbunny out. "I've had my head stuck behind Suzuhara-san's dryer."

"Ooh, sounds exciting."

"Oh, it was," Heero assured him. "Especially after Suzuhara-san got upset with me."

"Uh-oh. What did you do?"

"What are you doing, Duo?"

Duo pulled his hands out from under the water and inspected them critically. "Wood stain. I got wood stain on my hands." Deeming them clean enough, he shut off the water. "This stuff's a bitch to get off."

"Ah. I worried for a moment that you were getting obsessive-compulsive on me." Heero turned the water back on for a moment to rinse the soap suds down.

He rolled his eyes, moving out of the way to dry his hands off. "You're so changing the subject. What did you do to piss Suzuhara-san off?"

"She was overreacting."

"She gives us free food, Heero. You better not have done anything to jeopardize that."

Finished with rinsing the sink down, Heero flicked the excess water off his fingers before using the other end of Duo's towel. "She just thought I was corrupting her daughter, that's all."

Oh, that was all. Happened every day. Really. "Well, it's about time." He paused as a nerve-racking thought struck him. "...Wait. She didn't find out that Ami knows, did she?"

"No. And in light of today, I'm certainly glad she didn't."

Duo punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Stop it with the suspense already and spill."

Heero shrugged as if it was nothing, heading out the door towards their bedroom. "Ami let it slip that I explained sex to her."

"So? What's the... hm." He followed along behind his partner. "Well, come on. It's you, right? I mean, it's not like you're gonna misinform her or something."

"I'm not certain what the big deal was." Heero pulled his bottle of moisturizer out from the bedside stand. The skin on his hands was feeling dry after his adventure in the deep, dusty darkness. "I think she may have been peeved by the fact that I didn't resist Ami's demands."

Duo sat down on the bed and held out his hand after Heero was done with the lotion. After all that handwashing, his skin could probably use a layer of protection, too. "Maybe she wanted to be the one that gave the talk."

Heero let out a small laugh. "She implied that. She thinks I don't have a romantic bone in my body."

The snicker-snort-choke met little resistance as it escaped from Duo. "Aw, man, little does she know. Wait, you're not, like, filling Ami's head with all that crap, are you?"

"'Crap'?" He affected an offended tone. "You know you wouldn't hate it so much if you didn't secretly like it."

Duo kicked his shin. "I do not!"

"You do--" Realizing that arguing would get him nowhere, he just leaned down and kissed Duo deeply instead, moving further down to nibble on his neck thereafter.

"Mmm. Unfair." The protest was weak. The smile on his lips was not.

Heero sniffed carefully a few times before disengaging. "You smell like wood."

"Working with wood will do that to you. You like?"

He inhaled again. "Makes me feel like putting cedar blocks in the dresser." When he pulled back, he had a faintly puzzled look on his face. "I feel so domestic."

Duo poked him in the tummy and laughed at him. "Maybe we should take up woodworking as a new hobby or something. It's kinda fun."

Heero moved to take a seat beside him on the bed. "How much did you do today?"

"Not lots. Replaced some of the broken banister stuff around the choir box. Fixed the bottom panel of the lectern. Helped mount a new bulletin board. ...Played with the candlesticks. Talked."

"I'm such an underachiever next to you."

"A domestic underachiever, huh?" He smirked, but the expression faded as he went contemplative. "Mac was a good sounding board, as usual. I think we should just pick a color and paint the living room."

"Thought we weren't ready to commit yet."

"Well, that's the point... Why aren't we? I mean, it's just paint, right? We should just do it and get it over with. We get it wrong, we do it over again. No big deal. What's stopping us? Nothing but our own hesitance. Maybe we should just... do it. I'm sure once we get past that first big hurdle that we'll find out there was really nothing to it all along."

Heero nodded thoughtfully. "Hmm. Not a bad theory. Did Father MacKenzie say all that?"

He punched Heero's arm again. "Hey. What are you implying?"

Heero rubbed at the target location, not too far from the hit he had taken in the bathroom. "I'm feeling a little abused here."

Duo lifted a hand to strike at him again, but Heero caught it before it made contact and a short tussle ensued upon the bed. Heero ended up winning, but mostly because Duo got distracted by a stray thought in the middle of their sparring match. "It was a good idea, yeah?"

"Hm." Heero was more occupied by trying to come up with some good ideas, now that he had Duo pinned beneath him.

"Widely applicable...."

"Hm."

"Strip."

"H... What?" He reviewed the last few seconds in his head and concluded that no, he hadn't missed anything Duo might have said that might explain this.

"'Cuz maybe it's a huge thing, and maybe it isn't, but either way, it's just a step, right?"

"...What?"

"And yeah, I'll be man enough to admit it: I'm kinda getting hung up on this. Or if I'm not fully hung up on it now, I know I'm gonna be. It's got 'hang-up' written all over it."

Heero felt that asking 'what?' again would be a little redundant at this point, so he let the moment slide by and hoped that perhaps enlightenment would be soon in coming.

"And like we were just saying -- well, I guess it is a little bit of a leap of logic. As usual, you had to be there. But whatever. Either way, there's no point in waiting for things to magically solve themselves. Sometimes, you just gotta do whatever you gotta do to get the ball rolling on things. And maybe you just gotta get used to some things, just a little bit at a time, and then it'll stop being such a big thing. So really, I think you should just take your clothes off."

Heero blinked hard, scrunching his face up for a moment in an attempt to clear his mind. Things had just started to make sense when Duo threw that final curveball at him again. "...What are we talking about?"

Duo sighed and slowed down his explanations to a comprehensible pace. "I just know that I'm gonna freak out when I see you naked. Not that I haven't already seen you naked, but I mean in a sexual setting. Well, okay, I kinda did that, too, but whatever. That's just not cool. So I was just thinking that maybe if we just got the naked part out of the way first, then when it happens in the middle of something, it'll all just be familiar territory. That sounds reasonable, right?"

It did sound strangely reasonable. It just didn't seem like it should, though. "...So you want me to take my clothes off," Heero responded slowly.

"Well, I can..." There was a brief hesitance before he convinced himself to finish the sentence. "I can take my clothes off, too."

"...And then we're just going to... stare at each other?"

"I dunno. Figured something would come to mind if we got that far." Heero got to use that excuse all the time. Seemed only fair that Duo could use it occasionally, too. "And Heero?"

Heero blinked cautiously, not quite certain of what was coming next. "...Yeah?"

"Don't give me any variation on 'we don't have to', okay?"

"...But..."

"I know. Okay? I appreciate the concern. End of story." It was nice having someone look out for his interests. Comforting, even. But he was sort of getting to the point where he didn't want doubt or even a chance of flight to enter either of their minds, and if Yuy would just get onboard his plan to simply bull his way forward to the finish line, everything would work out just fine. "Now are you gonna strip or what?"

Heero shifted his weight back in thought, and a few seconds passed before one of his hands moved slowly to the button underneath his collar. It slipped free of the hole with a solemn air.

The anticipation could drive a man crazy, and Maxwell was crazy enough as it was. Gauging Heero's action as agreement, he reached up to do the deed himself, releasing two more buttons and sliding his hand along the skin exposed with the opening of the shirt before he paused, then withdrew with a frustrated sound. "Argh, no, you're gonna have to do this yourself." With Heero already in an unbalanced state, it wasn't too difficult to buck beneath him and toss him off to the side. Duo sat up and crossed his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits. "Don't want anything sexual about it, nope, and if I undress you, well, way too suggestive. Said it was gonna be completely non-sexual, right? That was the point."

This was still making a bizarre amount of sense. Once a person ignored the large leap of logic that had brought them to this point. Heero stared at the ceiling for a little while before turning a somewhat bemused expression on his partner. "You make my head hurt sometimes, Maxwell."

Good humor smirked out of his expression for a brief moment before consternation won a place on a frowning brow. Maybe there was a reason why Heero always asked him that question. Maybe it wasn't for Duo's sake. "You're not with me on this one, are you?"

"And yet," Heero continued, ignoring the question for the moment. "In a move that defies all logical explanation, I keep you around. Must be love." He stretched up, pulled Duo down, and kissed him softly, sticking to Duo's directive and keeping it non-sexual.

Leaving Duo to ponder the significance of that, Heero got off the bed and moved halfway across the room. With a heavy glance over his shoulder at a glum Duo, he smiled lopsidedly, turned his head back in the direction of the door, and proceeded to finish unbuttoning his shirt.

He was letting it slip from his shoulders by the time Duo's disappointment transformed into a nervous excitement. He turned his back to Heero, took a deep breath, and pulled his t-shirt over his head. See, that wasn't so hard. They'd seen each other's bare chests quite often. And, well, Heero had seen him in just gym shorts or boxers before, so the pants came off with only another slight hesitance. And then his fingers lingered at the waistband of his briefs. Well, go on, he encouraged himself. It was only fair. He had interrupted Heero in the middle of his shower, after all. Behind him, Heero was no doubt plodding along as methodically as ever. Aw, cripes, that didn't make him feel better at all. No, he could hear Heero neatly folding his clothes as they were shed. Duo decided the obsessive neatness betrayed his nerves, that Heero was buying time to steel himself. Yes, that made things easier for him.

Determined to think no longer on the matter, he tugged his briefs down and stepped out of them, stricken by the brief notion of throwing them across the room so there could be no return, but something about that seemed disturbingly sordid. With his luck, they'd just get stuck in the ceiling fan or tossed out the window or something. Not that they had a ceiling fan. And not that the window wasn't behind him. Didn't matter. Something stupid was sure to happen to him if he did, so he tossed it aside into the stack of the rest of his clothes and tried to forget that a change of mind lay only a meter away.

"So what now?" Heero asked, assuming by the lack of sound that they were both done.

"So I guess... we turn around." He took a deep breath. "On three. One. Two. ...Three." He turned, and found Heero already looking back at him. "Hey! You turned early!"

Heero shrugged, keeping eye contact between the two of them. "I turned when you said we should turn. How was I supposed to know you were going to start counting down?"

Duo spluttered indignantly for a few betrayed seconds before his jumpy humor caught up with him again. A faint chagrin stained his lips with a rueful twist before a small chuckle won free. His shoulders shook, and he looked down to his feet to hide the expression that would offer a concession to Heero's logic. This unfortunately afforded him a view of other portions of his body, and the laughing slid to a halt. He swallowed, then brought his head back up to meet Heero's eyes again, shutting his own eyes as they made the journey so as not to catch sight of anything inadvertently.

Once again, his gaze was met evenly, and he felt reassured by the sudden knowledge that Heero hadn't taken advantage of his distraction to get an early jump on things. Okay, he thought, he could do this. Wasn't anything he hadn't seen before. And it wasn't anything he wasn't planning on seeing again. And again. And again. So this was just the beginning. The beginning of... things. No prob. Piece of cake. Just a glance. That would be one. Then another glance, which would be two. And eventually they'd add up and it'd just be another part of the Heero landscape.

Alrighty then. Just had to ignore the surreal edge to things created by the sunlight through the window near Heero giving him a faint halo effect -- at least it was the hair on his head, a small voice in his head sniggered, and not the hair on -- Duo stopped that thought before it got anywhere. Clearing his mind of distractions, he made sure his look turned significant, that Heero would see the same sort of look that he might if they were on a mission, agreeing silently on when to break cover. The message was received, and then they looked down.

A handful of tense seconds passed before Duo's eyes widened. "Sonuvabitch!" he swore.

Heero blinked. Okay. Not the usual reaction of someone looking at his penis. Not that there was a 'usual' reaction, but still. "Huh?"

"You're not cut!"

He looked pointedly at his partner's groin. "Neither are you."

"I know! That's the point!" Duo snarled another silent curse before spinning away in irritation.

Resigning himself to this just being one of those days, Heero suppressed a sigh. "Duo," he started mildly. "I feel like I'm missing something here."

"No, you're not! That's the point!"

Fair enough. "And... why is it the point? You know people don't really circumcise anymore, right?"

"Ugh, god, I should have known! I mean, I did know, but I never really knew, I guess. Argh, but it should have been obvious. Of course they wouldn't be telling the truth. Oooh, those... those... those sons of bitches!"

He really hoped Duo was talking about circumcision in general, and not his personal state. "Who said what about which thing?"

Without a squeal of protest, their new mattress kindly absorbed the shock of Duo throwing himself down in a huff. "Circumcision is still practiced, you know."

"Really?" He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. There were people all over the place doing all sorts of crazy things all the time. Nevertheless, he hadn't expected it. It was such an outdated practice that it was a complete non-issue. A good portion of the population had probably never even heard of it. He only happened to have a thorough education in human anatomy.

"Yup. Where else but good ol' L2?"

Almost certain that that was rhetorical, he instead asked the only thing that came to mind. "Why?"

"Because they're rich, idiotic snobs, of course! Blargh. Who else would lop off a piece of their skin for the sake of holier-than-thou-ness?"

That was probably rhetorical, too. "Research has shown for centuries that there are no provable health benefits that result from circumcision, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, tell that to those rich bitches." He waved his hand in the general direction of space. "I don't know when it started. I think it was just a trendy thing to do. Maybe it was all the diseases floating around." He waved his hand in the air again, this time dismissively. "Yeah, yeah, I know, no health benefits. Maybe desperate times call for desperate measures, and all that shit. And of course, I'm sure they just loved one more way to distinguish themselves even further from the rest of the plebians."

"It cost money?" Heero hazarded, sitting down tentatively beside him.

"Of course it cost money. It cost money just to have your damn kid in a hospital. Of course, there were underground ways of doing it." He shuddered. "After all the fuss the hoity-toities kicked up about it, they pretty much had people convinced it was the thing to do. Shit, some desperate parents tried doing it themselves. That usually didn't work out so well. It was like some sign of class. We could tell, you know? I knew this one kid who'd been cut, and it drove him nuts. Didn't remember or know his parents, but knew they musta been well off, so why was he on the streets now? And the hookers I used to know, they knew. They said they could tell how a man was born, no matter what his current class was. Said some of the new girls, the ones that didn't start out quite so low, sometimes they'd refuse to do a guy that wasn't 'clean'. It was like the biggest, stupidest thing."

"But when you got out of there, you noticed, right?"

He snorted. "What, you think I spent all my time staring at other guys' dicks?" When Heero started to offer a reasonable explanation, Duo waved him off. "Yeah, but what did it matter? Wasn't like spacers and Sweepers were all rich bastards. I did look it up once. Looked up a lot of stuff. Curious, yanno? Never believed most of the shit coming out of that sector anyway. Rich people do illogical things all the time. So yeah, I knew, I just..." His glance fell briefly into Heero's lap. "Guess it's just another one of those stupid things that didn't quite sink in the first time."

Heero nudged him over to win enough space to lie down on his side next to him. There was an incoming sunbeam that seemed quite promising. "They must have been pretty desperate, whether to avoid disease or create a social stigma, to have started cutting off their foreskin."

Duo shrugged, the motion lost as he wiggled over to make room. "I don't think a lot of people did it. Probably not as many as it seemed to us, which was damn near everyone and their mother -- well, father, I guess. L2 or otherwise. But still. Just another one of those have and have-not things."

"Have you always considered me a 'have', Duo?"

"...Well, you know..." Any easy answer faded from his mind when Heero looked at him intently. "Not really... I mean, sure, you weren't where I was, but you're not one of them. But L1's... closest to Earth.... Hey, sorry about cussing when I got a good look at you. It was just a surprise, I think, maybe some nerves. God, I don't know what had to have crossed your mind when I swore like that all of a sudden. Ugh, you know it wasn't personal, Heero, not like, 'omigod what the hell is that?'"

"I think mostly I was just confused." Heero paused, then laughed heartily.

Duo got a bit apprehensive, squirming a little in place. "What?"

Heero's lips brushed Duo's shoulder. "You were right. This was a really good idea."

Somehow, it really didn't seem like it. "You mean... like, tomorrow I'm not going to be dying of embarrassment?"

"I hope not. And wouldn't it be nothing compared to what would have happened if you hadn't suggested this? What would have happened if you'd gotten a good look at me while we were in the middle of something?"

Utter mortification squeezed his entire body into a shameful wince. "Oh, god, you're right. What a mood killer! And what if I'd had my hands on you at the time? I could have hurt something!"

Heero's turn to wince reflexively. "Ouch."

"Aw, man," Duo sighed, amusement taking the edge off his anxiety. Maybe a little adrenaline, too. His current mood wasn't entirely unlike what came after dodging a literal bullet. "Well, hey, at least I came up with a good idea, then."

In theory, anyway. In practice, they were perhaps still lacking. Heero laid a careful hand on top of Duo's stomach. "And in this plan, then, what comes next?"

Duo may have been more relaxed, but that didn't mean he was any more confident. He thought over his answer carefully. "Well, I don't know about you, but I think I got most of the looking part done with." Not that that was really the problem. It was just that looking made him think about other things, and he was still easing his way into those sorts of thoughts. He chuckled nervously. "Unless you got any more surprises hiding out down there."

"None that I know of. And you?" He felt Duo's abdominal muscles tighten slightly before the answer came.

"Guess you could just go see for yourself."

After a respectful half-minute, Heero's hand drifted, drawing a hesitant line between the bumps of Duo's hipbones before considering a migration south. Looking was nothing to him. It was well-formed, healthy, normal. He'd been quite aware of its presence all this time, and there would be much time later to intimately acquaint himself with all of its particulars. No, more unknown to him was the action side of the equation. His fingers hovered on the fringes of Duo's pubic hair before dipping down to comb through the rough patch, cataloguing the texture. He decided he preferred the hair on top of Duo's head in terms of overall satisfaction, but that this... this spoke to a different part of him, the part that wasn't so interested in soft and silky smooth.

A twitch of his hand propelled him down further along his chosen path, and Duo shuddered, suppressing that natural instinct to pull away from anything other than himself getting so close to a source of vulnerability. Heero cupped his hand beneath his flaccid flesh and picked it up with almost reverent care, sending another shiver through him. It was disconcerting to be relieved of that familiar weight between his legs. He tried not to shift uncomfortably. The delicate examination of his nether regions kind of tickled, sending tiny tremors of sensation through him that so were not the point of this exercise. "Could I, uh, persuade you to be a little less gentle? I mean, you don't have to get all rough or anything, just... it's just my dick, man. You don't have to go treating it like it's some national treasure -- and oh my friggin' god don't you dare say anything to contradict that!" He covered his face with his hands. "I just-- I just don't to want hear it, okay?!"

The hand stilled; the grip firmed, but then after a few absent-minded strokes of his thumb, it withdrew altogether to the relatively neutral zone of the thigh.

Duo peeked out from between his fingers. "Well, I didn't mean that--"

Heero shook his head. He just needed to stop. His fingers had started to get ideas, and now was not the time to indulge them. "I believe the plan was simply to become accustomed to our nudity," he reminded them both, turning to lie flat on his back. "Being that we both agreed that it was a good plan, we shouldn't waste it."

"Yeah." With a sense of relief, Duo fell back into a relaxed pose for a companionable minute before laughing. "Geez. A few years ago, and I'd never have thought I'd be having a discussion on the socio-economic ramifications of foreskin. With you, no less."

"I think I'm still not entirely convinced we just had that conversation."

"Meh. So I'm weird, sometimes. But you go along with it, so that makes you just as weird."

"I was weird long before I ever started going along with you, Maxwell. And you took great joy in reminding me of that fact, too."

"I still do take great joy in that."

"You're very weird indeed, Maxwell."

"Yup. But you love me for it."

"I do love you, Duo. And your foreskin, too."

"... ... Argh!" he screeched at long last. "How the hell do you say things like that with a straight face? That's... that's beyond weird, Yuy! That's so it!" He rolled away from Heero to lie defiantly on his belly. "See if I ever let you near my dick again!"

Heero finally cracked a smile. "Shall we see...?" He rolled over as well, taking a moment to reach underneath his body and arrange himself properly. This was why he preferred briefs to boxers. He liked keeping everything secured in a safe position. Once that was done, he slid his hand across Duo's skin, up to the loose base of his braid and down to the small of his back.

Dammit, he chose the strangest times to get frisky. Duo reached back awkwardly, trying to bat the hand away without compromising his safe position. The tingle that zipped through him when Heero's hand swept across his bare butt as it danced away surprised him, but not as much as he thought it could have. "Stop that, Yuy! No sex stuff, remember?"

Phooey. The hand calmed and settled innocuously on the far side of Duo's hips. Heero turned a little to look down the expanse of flesh they had chosen to expose. Two strong, healthy bodies, for the most part. There were a few flaws here and there, but they gave the landscape a little personality, he thought. The two of them had changed over the years. An eighteen year old human male was a far cry from his fifteen year old self. Their bodies were finally creeping their way toward an adulthood the rest of their selves had already realized. He admired the view for a minute, tracing the curves and shadows of toned musculature with his eyes before commenting. "Your butt is really damn white."

Having been lulled into a comfortable state of non-thought by Heero's sedate presence, he was startled into a laugh before any offense considered taking root in his mind. "What?" He craned his head over a shoulder to catch sight of his posterior. Heero's hand lingering over his sacrum partially obscured his line of sight, but he saw enough to frown, then glance over at Heero's rear end. "So is yours."

Heero also transferred his focus to observe his own pale behind. "Hm. I don't exactly sit around sunbathing bare-bottomed all day."

"And what, I do?" Duo retorted.

He rubbed Duo's back thoughtfully. And if his fingers occasionally wandered a little south of Duo's back, well, that was entirely unintentional. "Maybe... maybe we should, today."

The suggestion was processed with a level of puzzlement that eventually gave way to good cheer. He felt better having an alternative excuse for the situation they were currently in. "Mm, it is a rather nice day today."

"And you have such a lovely window."

Indeed, the safety from snipers and other possible voyeurs led them to keep the blinds open most of the time, and their earlier work with their friends had still left them maybe one good sunning hour to themselves. "It's a date," Duo concurred, settling into sunning position. He closed his eyes for a second or two, enjoying the friendly heat of the sun. He realized even his toes seemed to be receiving the benefits of that, and they curled in response. Eventually, quite a bit of the rest of him as well couldn't wait until they painted the walls something equally warm. It was going to be grand.

When he felt Heero shifting beside him, he opened his eyes again. "Hey. It was your butt that was white."

Heero adjusted the pillow beneath his head, and afterwards left both his hands up there in a classic pose of relaxation. "This side could use a little sun, too."

The remark drew Duo's attention down to the re-exposed side in question, and yes, he observed, Heero's skin tone did change a little in the transition from abdomen to knees. He further observed the way the sun shone off the rest of Heero's skin, and in particular the way the light was now picking up highlights in Heero's pubes and damn him if there wasn't a hint of a halo. He stifled a laugh and turned towards Heero for a hug. The contact was restricted to their upper halves at first, but then he deliberately pressed his entire length against Heero's side. It was oh so warm. He snuggled there contentedly for a few seconds, getting used to the feeling before he laid a finger atop Heero's lips as a precautionary measure. "I... I can't imagine myself doing this with anyone else, Heero."

Heero kissed the finger, but otherwise did as bidden and offered no similar sentiments in return.

OWARI

for the record, i am not trying to take any sort of socio-economic stance on the issue of circumcision. it just seemed appropriate.

 

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