Warning: um... a little morbid humour... a lot of cheese.:D oh and a little improbability.
Never Kissed a Girl Part 3
I met Duo in the lobby of my hotel at six the next morning. He was surprisingly prompt. I had no idea where I got the notion that he liked to sleep in. It would seem that I was wrong.
"Yo, Heero," he said, by way of greeting, slinging an arm around my shoulders in a manly, hug-type-thing.
Then he promptly dropped his head to my shoulder and feigned sleep. Complete with loud, obnoxious snores.
I tried to pick him up and dump him in the fountain.
Damn boy gained a lot of muscle mass and height in the intervening eight years.
The most I managed to do was knock him over onto one of the plush, vibrantly floral couches next to the fountain.
There was some boyish tussling before we were curtly escorted off the premises by security. I was given a stern warning and made to promise I would return in a more orderly manner or not at all.
"You are always getting me in trouble, Duo Maxwell," I said as I sulked quietly in my little corner of the hotel driveway.
He laughed and replied: "Oh yes, saving your sorry ass from an Alliance naval hospital. That's getting you in trouble."
"Throwing me out of a 40 story window, Maxwell!"
"Hey, I gave you a parachute," was his response.
This, of course, led to more playful pushing and shoving.
I stopped it just short of an all out brawl.
Both completely out of breath, we came to the mutual conclusion that we needed to sit down as soon as possible. It would appear that we were no longer as young as we had thought.
He teased me mercilessly about being old and out of shape. I almost started something again, but at the crucial moment (before my fist hit his face) we happened by a cozy little café advertising breakfast for $1.99. Never one to pass up a bargain, Duo grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me inside.
We seated ourselves at a stability-challenged table and waited for our waitress.
Duo took this "down time" to ask me about The Vacation.
"So what did you decide, Heero? Can I join you on your Journey of Love?" he asked, drawing out the last word in a ridiculous manner.
I tried to kick him, but got the leg of the table instead.
The next few minutes were occupied with us trying to right the table again. In the end, Duo got down under it and fiddled about for a minute, re-emerging with a triumphant grin.
The table was perfectly balanced.
I arched an eyebrow at him, a move I'd practiced long and hard in front of a mirror after seeing it in a movie with Relena.
He tried to imitate it but succeeded only in grossly contorting his facial features.
The waitress arrived, giving us our menus and a Look that clearly stated her less-than-stellar opinions of us. But, judging from her lack of verbal admonition, I'd say she must have gotten some real characters in here at six am. Even Duo couldn't pry a reaction out of her.
We placed our orders and returned, reluctantly on my part, to the topic of the "Getting Laid Parade" as Duo now termed it.
"So can I come?"
He was oddly eager and, quite frankly, it was creeping me out.
I countered with a question of my own: "Don't you have work or something?"
"I'm a consultant, Heero, no health benefits, but great pay and self-dictated hours, baby!" He leaned his elbows on the now-sturdy table and looked me right in the eye. "Let me help you get your rocks off."
The slamming down of two coffee cups between us signaled the return of our waitress and her "cheery" mood.
"I don't want you boys talking 'business' in here," she growled. "It may be early morning, but this is a family establishment in a nice part of town. We don't turn away paying customers, but you keep your 'wares' to yourself."
I had no idea what my face was doing, but Duo's looked like it was going to blow. His cheeks were puffed out from trying to hold in his laughter and he was red from collarbone to hairline.
I tried to mumble some apology or excuse...or something, but the woman had stalked off.
We literally shoveled down our breakfasts, tossed a handful of bills by the register, and ran out the door. I didn't think I'd ever been so embarrassed in my life. Duo, however, seemed to revel in being called a prostitute. He flung his arms around me and kept trying to get a hand up my shirt or down my pants. He also kept propositioning me, loudly and explicitly, whenever he saw someone within hearing distance.
After a spectacular display of lewd behaviour in front of a place of worship, I mustered all my strength and managed to hoist the laughing idiot over my shoulder in a fireman's carry. I carried him over to a garbage bin and threatened to throw him in if he didn't give it up. It took a bit of convincing, but Duo finally agreed.
Then I dropped him on his ass.
"I think you broke my butt," he said, as he got to his feet, rubbing his abused derriere. He turned his back to me and continued speaking: "Kiss it and make it better?"
"Bend over," I replied, trying to maintain a completely innocuous expression.
That got him started on another round of giggles. Men should not "giggle" but for lack of a better word, that was what he did. For a significantly longer period than the situation warranted too.
"It wasn't that funny," I said as I led him out of the alley.
He was leaning on me, looking for all the world like he was having some kind of seizure, as we stumbled out into the watery "daylight" of the colony.
"Oh, but it was, Heero. You have no idea how funny," he managed to say between chuckles.
I shrugged and let it go. I had resigned myself, nine years ago, to never understanding Duo's sense of humour. There was always something behind that twinkle in his eye, but I was sure I would never get it. The boy had been hard to fathom, the man, it seemed, would be impossible.
We were meandering back towards the hotel when I suddenly remembered my promise to the security guard. It didn't seem like Duo was going to "sober up" anytime soon so I steered us towards the embassy district. Shops and street vendors on Rue L'internationale (the only street with a French name in all of L1) were open pretty much twenty-four hours a day for the embassy staff who had to live by the hours of their country/colony of origin. It was pretty colourful place and I remembered liking it when I was a kid here.
I also remembered doing a lot "work" there.
Suffice to say I knew every rooftop, fence, bush, hedge, rock, decorative plaque, obelisk, statue, and sign for a three mile radius. The sewage, drainage, and water systems? A five mile radius.
It wasn't something I was proud of, but it was something that I did.
"Hey, Heero? What's this?" Duo was scuffing his toe at a faintly discoloured patch on the sidewalk in front of the L4 embassy. "Spatter? It almost looks like--"
"Ambassador Adri Keer."
Duo gave me a sidelong look, which I returned with an equally neutral expression.
"Good times," he finally said.
"Want the tour?"
Oh look, he finally managed to master the art of raising one eyebrow.
"You're shitting me, right?"
"Apparently colonies weren't made for easy cleaning," I pointed to a splotch on the roadway, a few feet from where we were standing. "Keer's bodyguard."
Duo chuckled.
Suddenly I was taken back to an earlier time, the two of us running through a seemingly endless white corridor, bullets flying all around us, and Duo laughing. There was a dark edge to it, but somehow I felt that this was Duo's genuine laugh. Duo was morbid little bastard. He was a fun guy to be sure, but sometimes he walked just a little over the line of scandalous. This deep, almost creepy, laughter of his was really, I suspected, the laugh of true delight.
So we whiled a way a couple hours, wandering up and down the main thoroughfares and winding through the alleys between the various embassies. I pointed out all of my handiwork, some of which had left indelible traces on the colony infrastructure, some of which had been effectively cleaned or covered up. Duo rather enjoyed my tales of "valour". He snickered when I told him about walking right into the Canadian embassy, unchallenged, pistol tucked safely inside a stuffed rabbit. He laughed outright at the time I'd fallen asleep during a rooftop stakeout, only to wake up with a jolt and roll off the ledge, landing on the diplomat I was supposed to kill. Lucky for me, I was apparently a heavy kid, because I broke his neck.
All in all, Duo was thoroughly entertained by our grisly tour of L1.
In fact, when we were done with the embassy district, he all but begged to know if I'd killed anyone else in the vicinity. I rolled my eyes and informed him that he was not supposed to glean such joy and amusement from the tales of my misspent and traumatic youth. He replied that it made for a hell of a better anecdote than his "on Friday, I was so hungry, I thought I was going to die; but then on Saturday, I realized I was still alive and even hungrier."
I couldn't really argue with that.
"God, we're so fucked up," he said with a wide grin, throwing one arm across my shoulders. "Do you ever tell your dates these stories?"
I shook my head vehemently. "Relena forbade me. She said that while she found it endearing, most people would find it freaky."
He gave me an awkward pat on the head and a little squeeze of a hug. "I find it endearing," he said.
"Want to see where I almost blew a hole in the colony wall with a grenade launcher?" I asked, beaming at him.
He laughed and begged me to lead on.
It really shouldn't have been this funny. I knew that. Killing people was wrong and it had always weighed heavily on my conscience. Yet somehow, with Duo, everything seemed to take on a wry, comical twist. My stories were no longer sad, sombre things full of regret and despair. Instead, they became droll anecdotes full of lucky chance, coincidence, and wit. I found myself blathering on and on at him, barely allowing him a word in edgewise. I was horribly embarrassed by the way I was running off at the mouth, but I couldn't seem to stop myself.
That damn boy seriously had some magical effect on those filters in my brain.
As we walked past a grassy knoll, which I knew had once been a residential apartment building, Duo stopped to smell the flowers, as it were.
"Have you ever rolled down a hill, before, Heero?" he asked, a strange gleam in his eye. He probably had never seen such a large park on a colony before.
Of course, this park hadn't always been this large.
"Once, when I was a kid here," I replied, nodding at the hill before us.
But some memories were better left untouched. There was no spin that could make this one amusing.
"Was it fun?"
"I just got dizzy and disoriented."
Duo looked at me.
"But was it fun?"
"I think I remember spraining my wrist."
He nodded.
"I thought so. If it makes you feel better, I got this wicked grass burn on my face last year when I tried it here."
I could not stop the grin I feel forming.
"Don't laugh!" he cried. "It really hurt, and I think I'm scarred for life!"
He turned the abused cheek towards me and I made a show of examining it minutely for any scarring.
"It looks fine to me," I said in conclusion.
"I was talking about my new phobia of grass."
I hit him.
Laughing, he shoved me away and took off running up the small hill. I gave chase, but let him win the impromptu race. I remember playing one-on-one with him during the war. I'd checked him pretty hard and instead of getting mad at me he'd asked if I liked winning more than playing the game. I think I quoted that old adage: "if it's not about winning, then why do they keep score?" Little, skinny, fifteen-year-old Duo had cocked head at me and asked me what the score was.
Funny thing, I hadn't been able to say.
Largely because at the time I hadn't quite known how the scoring in one-on-one basketball worked. I'd never played before then.
Still whooped his ass though, I'd bet.
When I reached the top of the hill, Duo greeted me with a question: "You want to run down?"
I shook my head and plopped down in the surprisingly lush green grass.
"Isn't this great?" he remarked, running his fingers through the thick turf, braiding the little blades together. "It's funny how some things are better having been grown in a colony environment, huh, Heero?"
My gaze traveled up from the grass between his long fingers, lingered on his sinewy, muscled arms, and met his sly expression, smirk for smirk.
"Like us?" I replied.
He grinned at me, a surprisingly open, full wattage, light up the entire colony, type of grin.
"So who understands you better than me, hm?" he asked.
I stared at him blankly.
"What do you think about when you masturbate, Heero?"
I nearly fell over.
What the hell was up with that question? Why was everyone so curious about my sexual habits? Was there something suspicious about me?
I rattled off my answer like it was rote: "Men, women, not dogs--"
"Dogs? Ew, Heero, that's disgusting! Why the hell would you think of dogs while you jerk off?"
I suddenly couldn't remember how the topic of dogs and masturbation got linked together in my mind.
"I'm sorry I asked!" he exclaimed and stood up with a loud huff. "Just for that, I'm not going to explain the birds and the bees to you!"
And then I'd be damned but he rolled down the hill.
TBC...
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