Kyuuketsuki Duo: Segue Part 2
Random Interlude II

"What?" Heero demanded of his partner. Duo had been staring at him all morning and it was beginning to get just the least bit unnerving.

Duo just kept staring.

"Hello? Duo?" He kept the exasperation mostly from his voice.

"Hm?" The guardian shook himself from his reverie. "Sorry, Heero. You say something?"

"Just why have your eyes been glued on me all morning?"

Duo blinked. "Oh, have they? I hadn't noticed. I was too busy studying your face." Which meant that he was busy keeping his eyes on Heero, which he realized but didn't. Heero could have wasted time trying to contemplate the bushel of contradiction in front of him, but he had long since decided that most times, it just wasn't worth the effort, so he just let it pass with a very tiny sigh of patient suffering.

"What about it?"

"Were you born with it?" Duo inquired cheerfully.

"Excuse me?" He guessed that question made sense in a much larger context, but out of the blue it was rather bizarre.

"I mean, did you do anything to it?" Duo attempted to clarify. It didn't work. Heero looked blankly back at him without responding, so Duo tried again. "Like...," he gestured vaguely with his hand. "I dunno. Maybe your psycho doctor guy tinkered with it. Or since you could be incorporeally Shinma if you really wanted to, probably, you could probably have just formed whatever you wanted to use as a face when you manifested corporeally, right? You can change your hands, maybe you can change your face. Something like that."

That actually did make sense, but Heero had never thought about it before. He supposed he could perhaps to some limited degree alter his appearance, but he never had, he didn't think. It seemed as if he had always worn this form. He would go so far as to say that this was the form and face he had grown up with, and to his knowledge, the doctor would not have done any aesthetic tinkering.

"Yes," he decided. "I was born with it."

"I like it," Duo declared.

A slight pause. "That's nice."

Duo twitched. "That's... nice?"

Well, it was nice, in a 'yeah, so what?' sort of way. But he had the definite feeling that Duo was waiting for some other sort of response as a tiny silence stretched. Thanking him for his opinion seemed a little ludicrous. It was just his opinion, after all. Agreeing with him seemed egotistical, and besides, Heero didn't particularly like or dislike his face. It was just a face. He wore it because he was born with it. Telling Duo that didn't seem appropriate; he probably wouldn't appreciate another casual dismissal of his opinion.

Heero didn't really know how to respond to compliments. He had never been complimented as he was being taught, and after that, creatures only complimented him when they wanted something from him, in which case the best policy was usually to ignore them. However, he was fairly certain that Duo was just being Duo and didn't want anything from him, and he was definitely certain he didn't want to treat him the same way he treated annoying, obsequious enemies. He decided to go with something neutral.

"Your countenance is pleasant as well."

Duo blinked his large violet eyes at him, several times into the renewed silence, his lips twitching again. Perhaps he had selected the wrong option. "Your hair is rather nice, too," he added calmly. And it was. When the light shone upon it in just the right ways, it showed more shades of warm browns than Heero had thought possible from a single human head. The shimmering spectacle was, at times, mesmerizing. It was also uniquely Duo. Heero had never seen anyone or anything else ever sport such silky, inviting tresses -- inviting because there had been that one flock of demons whose hair had been rather medusa-like in the way it had moved independently of its owner and tried to ensnare the unwary, but that had been definitely uninviting. No, Duo's hair was perfectly unsentient, friendly and warm and innocent, but still so full of the life Duo put into everything. He thought it only fair to tell him that, if that had been the kind of observation that Duo had been making about his face.

Duo's lips twitched once more, and then he gave up and burst out laughing. Heero could tell that it was filled with good-natured mirth rather than mockery, so he wasn't offended and instead patiently waited for his companion to calm himself. Duo grabbed the tail end of his braid and spoke to it. "Well," he addressed the hair. "Say thank you to the nice man." He turned back to Heero and shook the tail in his direction. "Thank you, sir!" he managed to choke out in an odd voice before he collapsed laughing again.

Heero silently raised an eyebrow, but otherwise waited him out. The joyous sparkle still lingered in his eyes when he had stopped sufficiently to speak coherently.

"Wow. I've got a lot of work to do, don't I?" he said, still chuckling as Heero just looked at him. He thought it had been a perfectly logically response.

Duo bounced out of the meditation bean bag. "Come on!" He grabbed Heero's hand and began dragging him outside. "Let's go play!"

The look on Heero's face was a curious blend of slightly amused tolerance and slightly disturbed confusion, but he didn't protest as his characteristically energetic friend pulled him along and out to the real world.

TBC...

 

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