Look! It's not the last day of the month! I'm actually kinda/sorta early. ^____^ Guess what happened to that silly thing from last month? Karma? EyePatch!Duo decided he wasn't quite done yet. I blame a certain birthday girl, so I thought it would be appropriate to get this posted before tomorrow. ^_____^
So, a little bit more of Karma... Karma II, if you will. And it's Quatre POV of all things. This is just more in the same theme... if you were not amused by Karma; move along, you won't be amused by this either. ^^; Otherwise... enjoy!
And happy birthday to all you September folks! *tosses confetti and serves cake*
Karma II
Being able to tell what other people are feeling is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass. Not because it is overwhelming or painful; empathy is a sense I was born with and it is no more difficult for me to filter out background emotions than it is for anybody else to filter out background noise. No, it is a pain in the ass because pinning down emotions is as difficult, as the saying goes, as herding cats.
I read emotions, not minds. Being able to tell that a person is angry or upset gives me no more insight than the next guy as to why, and why is the all important key to figuring a situation out.
Emotions should come with convenient little tags that would relate them back to the source. Sure, it was helpful to be able to tell that a member of my management team was angry, but it would be even more helpful to tell where that anger was directed. Was she mad at me? The situation? The lack of decaf in the board room? Her mother in law? Or maybe she just got stuck in traffic on the way in to the office? One possibility out of the five related to something I could do anything about, and the rest was none of my business.
Well, I suppose I could do something about the availability of coffee at my meetings, but I digress.
The point being, knowing that my best friend Duo Maxwell was 'upset' didn't do me a lot of good without that convenient little emotional-state tag.
Truth be told, I'd been sensing something was 'off' with Duo for several weeks, but since it hadn't seemed to have anything to do with me, I'd relegated it to the 'none of my business' file and done my best not to pry.
When you're an empath, after awhile people get sick and tired of the 'are you all right' question. Sometimes you have to just mind your own business and let your friends sort themselves out.
But when I arrived at Duo's place early the morning of his ocular implant surgery, and found him sitting in front of his computer playing some sort of solitaire card game instead of getting ready to go... it sort of made it my business.
Duo is an especially frustrating person at the best of times, when it came to picking up on his emotions. So very little of what he feels, reflects on the exterior, and it's sometimes surreal to try to mesh the two into a whole. Suffice it to say he usually just gives me a headache.
I had let myself in the front door since he'd been expecting me; I was his ride to the hospital after all, assuming that he would be getting dressed or some other task that would have fallen under the heading of 'getting ready to go'.
I had not expected to find him sprawled on the couch in nothing but his underwear and a half-buttoned shirt, his laptop balanced on one knee, solemnly tapping the touchpad and making cards shuffle across the screen.
If I had been called upon to make a snap assessment of his emotional state in that moment, I would have to have said... anxious. Not that I'd have said so out loud... I value the location of my kneecaps.
I just stood regarding him for a moment, figured out the rules to the game he was playing, noted that he was a briefs kind of guy... and felt his mood inch over into 'irritated'.
'Don't try to read me Winner,' he grumbled, and played a red King next to a Queen.
'Why don't you save me the trouble then,' I said in return. 'And just tell me why you're trying to make us late for your appointment?'
'We have plenty of time,' he grumbled, never taking his eye off the screen as he turned up the next card and frowned at it unhappily. It was a three and didn't fit the grid he was building.
'Plenty of time if you were driving,' I pointed out. 'But I'm driving and I have more of a tendency to obey little things like traffic laws and speed limits.'
He just grunted, passing over all the obvious come-backs, and keeping his attention on the cards instead. I gave him a few moments, watching the careful filling in of the grid in front of him.
When he didn't respond, I couldn't help poking at him... I hate being late. 'So you planning on getting ready any time soon?'
He frowned at a two and placed a six before he said, 'Waiting to see if there's any point.'
I mulled that over feeling something rise up under the surface of his upset that might have been embarrassment or might have been defensiveness. 'Wait,' I sighed, feeling the beginnings of a headache. 'Are you telling me that whether or not you keep your appointment today is riding on that card game?'
He couldn't quite contain the quirk of a grin that I honest to God couldn't catalog. Might have been smug, might have been proud, might have been embarrassed. With Duo, it's hard to tell. He discovered some years ago that if he concentrated hard enough on some past, strong feeling, that he could completely muddy the waters for me. He might just have been sitting there remembering the joy of the taste of a good steak.
'Yep,' was all he felt the need to say.
I sighed and gave in to the need to rub at the bridge of my nose. I dropped down onto the couch beside him, understanding that we weren't going anywhere in the next few minutes, making him steady the laptop until I'd settled.
I sensed annoyance and knew that it was because I was sitting on his bad side and he wouldn't be able to see me without turning his head completely. Not that I'd done it on purpose, but I didn't much care. We sat in silence for a few moments while he played, and I watched and tried to sort through the feelings drifting through the air.
'You're stalling,' I finally decided.
'No,' he corrected. 'I'm just that damn insensitive that I didn't call you to tell you we might not be going.'
I confess that it aggravated me that he followed my reasoning that closely. 'Using the game to make a decision for you is ludicrous... how do you know you aren't subconsciously throwing the game?' I tried anyway, not ready to let go of the theory.
'It's pure chance,' he explained, sounding as though his attention was barely on me. 'I place the initial cards, but the final one is a blind draw that fills in the last position.'
I just stared at him, feeling something unnamable trying to crowd to the surface and feeling him wrestle it down. I let the stalling theory go. He really was fighting with a decision that I would have thought wasn't a decision at all. Having your sight restored sort of seemed like a no-brainer to me.
I watched him frown in concentration for a few more cards.
'You can't let go of that whole pirate thing, can you?' I finally said, changing tactics completely. 'What is it? The parrot? The rum? The three cornered hat?'
It got me the burst of a surprised laugh, and in his moment of distraction the roiling, confusing emotions shone sharp and true for a second.
He really was scared.
I played the knowledge close to the vest, waiting to see how he would feint.
'I always wanted a pet,' he mused, shutting things away again. 'A parrot could be fun. I could teach it to curse in Japanese.'
Only the strange mental leap clued me in to the fact that he'd been off-balance for the moment. I snorted at the joke, but saw it for the total distraction it was. I wished for a Duo Maxwell conversational triangulation device. What is the pure exact opposite of pets and pirates? If I could figure that out, I might know what we weren't talking about. Though... Japanese? Had that been a random choice, or a Freudian slip?
'Heero could help,' I probed. 'I'm sure he knows more Japanese curse words than either of us.'
'No shit,' he muttered, seeming to mull over his choice of cards.
I felt no reaction to the mention of Heero's name and mentally fell back, watching his finger circle the curser over the selections on his screen. The eye-patch made it hard to read his expression from the side I was on. I wondered what it felt like to him, talking to me and not being able to see me, since he had yet to turn my way.
I was planning my next charge on the conversational battlements when I felt a subtle change in the atmosphere and hesitated.
'Instructor H,' Duo suddenly asked. 'Was he... you know... as screwed up as the rest of the doctors?'
I bit back on my initial desire to ask for the definition of 'screwed up', putting the question into the context of our current situation. 'Not really,' I had to confess, remembering the man who had been my tutor and co-conspirator in Operation Meteor for so many years. 'Unless you count some pretty crappy genetics.'
It won me a nervous little laugh and Duo placed his last card before suddenly sitting up and turning toward me. I'm completely unclear if it was to bring me into his line of sight, or to take the laptop screen out of mine. 'They were all pretty damn creepy,' he said, as though it had no bearing on anything, but his one-eyed gaze held mine for a long moment. I wasn't sure how to respond, and he looked away first, gaze falling back to his screen. 'Always kind of wondered how they started out,' he said, and while I could see the greenish glow of the cards on his face, I couldn't see the outcome of the game.
But then he just snapped the lid shut on the laptop and set it aside. 'We're gonna be late Winner,' he grumbled, as though the delay was all my fault. I could only blink after him as he stalked off to, presumably, finish getting dressed.
'I'm sure they won't start without you,' was the best I could manage. What he was feeling was nothing but mud to me. I wondered if he was deliberately thinking about something to block me out, and if so... what it was.
When I heard the bedroom door close, I turned his laptop and opened the lid once more, curious if having the surgery was a 'win' or a 'lose'.
The screen flared back to life and the cards still sat in mid game, all the squares filled in, but the final wild card unturned... the game unfinished.
Is it any wonder he gives me a headache?
I almost hit the button to play that final card, but then thought better of it, just closing the lid again and sliding the laptop back into position. In the long run, I suppose it didn't really matter how Duo had come to his decision, it just mattered that he had. And the fact that it was ultimately the decision I considered to be the right one, was just a bonus.
Some days I would hand over my empathetic abilities in a heartbeat for just five minutes of truth telepathy.
And other days... I just don't want to go there.
OWARI
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