Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 11
Friend of the Devil

(x) X (x)

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE!?!?” both Heero and Duo yelled at each other in perfect sync, causing Quatre to slam his hands over his ears, squint his eyes shut and shake his head in despair.

“This is my house,” Heero snapped in explanation, “but that still doesn’t tell me what you’re doing here.”

“Last time I checked, this was the Barton household,” Duo shot back with equal venom, “and I’m here to see Trowa Barton , so I don’t quite know what you’re on about Heero Yuy... or just plain on! I don’t think that you are said Trowa Barton.”

“Well doesn’t he just have every guy in town after him,” Heero spat sarcastically at the pair of them, his hand tightening on the doorknob. “And yes, this is the Barton household, if you must know, though why that means anything to you still eludes me.” He glanced at Quatre for a second, his eyes jumping up and down his form, adding, “You maybe”--he turned back to Duo--”but not you.”

“Oh shut up. Barton just wanted me to do some repairs on his brother’s Mini....” A sudden frightening thought suddenly dawned on him. “Oh...”

Heero arched his brows placidly, as if he knew exactly what was going through Duo’s head. “My Mini, you mean?”

“Yeah... I’m assuming that would be the one,” Duo said suspiciously, turning his head slightly to the side as he surveyed Heero through slitted eyes, “though I’m pretty sure your name is Heero Yuy, not Heero Barton.” That trademark Maxwell smirk crept across Duo’s face again as he commented darkly, “Unless you really are on something and you’ve convinced yourself that you’re part of the Barton clan all of a sudden.”

“Even if I was on anything, as you seem to be so sure of, I’d still be doing a hell of a lot better than you,” Heero responded almost automatically, ready to feul the duel of words with more than enough biting comments to keep Duo’s and himself at it all day. “If you really have to know, I still kept my dead mother’s surname when I started living with Trowa’s family.” He faltered, realizing the weight of the admission he had just made to Duo of all people and stood there in silence for a couple seconds with a furrowed brow. The look on his face made it seem like he was trying to look at the gently sloping curve of his nose. “Not that it matters to you , or like you even care,” he said quickly, giving his voice an extra jolt of anger to cover up his blunder.

Trowa showed up in the doorway with Heero just in time to save the day, bravely withstanding the dual shout of “YOU DID NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT HIM!” from Heero and Duo the second he made his appearance. Standing between them, he lowered the quivering fingers each rival had aimed disgustedly at the other and drew everyone further inside, closing the front door behind him.

“Of all people, Trowa, you get him,” Heero complained in a low grumble as they all stood in a messy circle in the small, dark foyer. Even though it was hard to make out his facial expressions in the dim gold light and extreme gray shadows cast by the antique brass lamp hanging overhead. “What were you thinking!? You know he hates me!”

“Heero, please, calm down,” Trowa said, guiding his quivering ‘brother’ with one arm, the other flung around Quatre as he guided the whole crowd of them through the foyer and into the nearby kitchen. “You said you wanted the car fixed and Quatre said he knew someone. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he was talking about Duo.”

“Nice excuse,” Heero muttered as he wrenched himself from Trowa’s restraining arm and stalked over to the large rectangular table sitting on the other side of the ambient kitchen.

Duo walked purposefully to the other side of the room and mounted one of the low wooden stools that lined the island in the middle of the room. He crossed his arms and drooped his head onto the white tiled surface, the frown on his face so exaggerated that his cheeks were starting to hurt as he tried his damndest to look everywhere but at the table where Heero was sitting. The kitchen was a brighter place than the rest of the house, with new stainless steel appliances and brighter lights, instead of the more gloomy Colonial feel that the other rooms seemed to have. The wood cabinets were white and trimmed with lightly stained wood that had been brushed with coarse white paint to look more worn and comfortable. White tiles covered the countertops, some of them decorated with small designs painted in blue pottery glaze here and there for flavour. The floor had been re-layed with the same light wood that had been used for the trim, glossy and obviously new, unlike the uneven moaning cherry wood floorboards that roamed across the rest of the flat.

“...I refuse to let him touch my Cooper,” Duo caught the tail end of what Heero was saying when he finally tuned back into reality.

“Heero, he’s good at fixing things--he’s good at fixing cars!” Quatre protested. He was sitting adjacent to the head of the table where Heero had situated himself. “I don’t understand what this whole thing between you and Duo is in the first place!”

“You want to know!? I’ll tell you, Winner,” Heero growled aggressively. “That,” he began, pointing in Duo’s general direction, “is the most uncaring, unruly”--he lost his control and sputtered a little before he managed to find the word--”devil I have ever met! He may look like just a pretty little punk idealist but there is no room anymore for anyone who doesn’t fit his mold! He complains about me? Look at him! He’s worse than me, stupid hypocrite.” He spat at Duo in conclusion, “You liar.”

“You’re a bastard,” Duo complained in a cynical tone from the other side of the room. Heero’s head snapped in his direction, forcing at him one of the most intimidating and frightening glares those dark blue eyes could muster. Duo sneered at it and gave his retort, his pride seriously wounded with Heero’s last words. “Ha, you think you’re so damn smart, don’tcha, Yuy? Well guess what: you’re wrong--wronger than wrong--about me!” Duo scooted away from the counter top, the legs of his stool scratching across the wooden floor with an earsplitting squeal that caused everyone in the room the wince. Leaping to his feet, he reclaimed the space between the stool and the counter and brought a passionate fist down onto the white tile. “You don’t know anything about me.” He clicked his tongue and added, “If you did, you’d know that I don’t lie, ever.”

“Maybe you never lie,” Heero shot back, rising from his seat to make himself as big as Duo, “but you sure are damn good at leading people on with the truth. You’re two people in one, Duo Maxwell. What I see is not who you are at all. Even a dumb jock could figure that out.” He frowned even more darkly at Duo and crossed his arms, refusing to speak or move until Duo took his next turn. It was like some very dark, twisted and seriously deranged form of chess, a game that neither was going to win any time soon if they kept at the rate they were going at. “I don’t like liars, I don’t like manipulators and I don’t like you!”

“Good!” Duo scoffed, throwing his arms in the air and spinning around on his heal so his back was facing everyone else. He crossed his arms and turned his nose up in the air. “We’re all on the same page. I don’t care at all for you, other than your eyes, Heero Yuy.”

“Right, good....” Heero bit back scathingly, mimicking Duo’s turned back. Then he thought about what Duo had just said. “Wait, what...?”

Duo’s face was bright red when he realized that he had just admitted that he thought Heero’s eyes were pretty. “N-Not that it matters or anything,” he stammered, swallowing hard and tilting his head even further back. He glared heatedly over his shoulder, saying, “Just about the only thing about you that’s worthwhile. Too bad you have the personality from hell.”

“I have the personality from hell?” Heero pointed to himself with exaggerated offense. “Look who talks!”

To Quatre, who was sitting at the table with his eyes shut tightly as he massaged his temples, it seemed like it would never end. They were driving him crazy with the constant bickering and jabs at each other. It was bad enough to have to listen to them, but when one could feel them too, it made everything twice as bad. Quatre’s Sense was dizzy with all the raging swirling emotions that were zipping around the room and crackling between Heero and Duo. There were thoughts flickering like ghosts here and there, but they either evaporated to nothing or were voiced before Quatre had a chance to think about them. He would have shouted at them a long time ago to just shut the hell up, but his head was pounding far too intensely for him to string together even a simple sentence out loud. So when Trowa decided to intervene, he put another name on his list of people he owed dinner to and practically wept with happiness that all that racket was hushed for even the shortest time.

“You two are fucking driving me up the wall!” Trowa yelled from where he was standing in the doorway, his voice rather harsh and louder than usual. Even the ordinarily silent Trowa, who rarely yelled or let his face and tone broadcast whatever he was feeling, looked like he was ready to rip off their legs and beat them both to death with them. “Every time you’re standing within twenty feet--no, miles--of each other, it’s a nonstop bitch-fest! You sound like third grade girls for God’s sake! It’s embarrassing!”

“Well Trowa,” Heero said placidly, a very disturbingly calm look on his face as he turned to face his brother, “whose fault is it for inviting him over?”

“Look, if I had known at the time, I wouldn’t have said it was okay,” Trowa snapped back, obviously riled and plummeting into a very bad mood. “I just said ‘my brother’s Cooper’ and Quatre had ‘this friend’, okay? Maybe I should have told him I was talking about you, but it really wasn’t something I was thinking about at the time. I was a little more preoccupied with doing something nice for your birthday. Sorry.”

“Apology not accepted,” Heero snapped angrily, wrenching his chair back out from underneath the table and plopping moodily onto it. “I refuse to let him touch my car!”

“You just better watch what you say, Yuy,” Duo growled from his spot on the other side of the kitchen, “because I will be collecting my pay from your brother, even if it doesn’t cover any other ‘adjustments’ I feel you might need, no, deserve for being... well... you!”

“Stop it, Duo!” Quatre said sternly from the other side of the room, forehead perched on the heel of his hand as his Sense twisted through his mind. “You’re doing the exact same things you complain about Heero for. You’re here now, so let’s just move on from here before you drive Trowa and me to early deaths.”

“Yeah, well that’s all his fault,” Duo retorted haughtily. “I was just peachy-keen until I got stuck being the manager for the stupid fucking lacrosse team.” He looked over his shoulder again so he could direct his words and Heero and Trowa. “I liked it better before I got acquainted to all you scumbags.”

“Duo, shut up!” Quatre said, his voice rising in volume, just short of a very angry yell. When Duo seemed to not have noticed Quatre’s command, he snapped and slammed both fists on the tabletop loud enough to make everyone startle a bit as he shouted, “Duo, shut the fuck up! You’re embarrassing me and I am so close to dragging you outside by the ear and drowning you in the ocean, it’s not even funny! One more word against Heero, and I’ll be on your ass so quick, you won’t even know what knocked you out, got it?”

Duo knew better than to argue with Quatre when he was pissed off and sealed his lips, sitting down again on the stool and staring pointedly at the wooden floor as he brooded. Heero smirked in Duo’s direction, pleased that Quatre had threatened Duo into silence and laughed maniacally under his breath.

“That goes for you too, Heero Yuy!” Quatre barked suddenly at the Japanese boy who, in response, also quieted himself and sat down gloomily. After about thirty seconds of pure unsettling silence, Quatre’s angry expression melted like a snowball in hell, watering down into the usually too-cute-for-his-own-good smile as he clapped his hands together. “Now then, where were we?” He sent a hard stare at each moping boy before continuing. “Oh yes, Heero’s Mini, that’s right.” His grin looked outright forced right then. “Heero,” the blonde boy reached to his side and grabbed the shoulder of Heero’s dark blue button-up shirt, yanking him sloppily to his feet, much to the cobalt-eyed boy’s increasing chagrin, “why don’t you show Duo where the car is so he can get started.”

Duo pounded a fist in acrimonious protest on the countertop, though no words escaped his tightly pursed lips while Heero just stood at his place at the table, staring at Quatre like he was a Martian. He tried to shrug off Quatre’s hand, which was still clamping tightly to his shirt, but found the Winner boy had a surprisingly good grip on the flimsy blue cotton. “I said I don’t want him touching my Cooper,” he snarled when he found that Quatre was not going to release his shirt, hoping to scare the blonde off of him. “Let go!”

“As soon as you agree to stop this stupid fighting and just let Duo do his job,” Quatre answered flatly, his fingers curling tighter around the sleeve. “If you love this Cooper as much as you say you do, don’t you think it would be nice if it actually had an engine that worked?”

“Goddammit, fine!” Heero threw his arms up in the air in defeat, resulting in his freedom from Quatre’s hold. Heero started across the kitchen, knocking Duo hard on the shoulder as he passed by the island on the way towards the back door on the other side of the room. He pulled it open fiercely, the flowery curtains hanging over the window swinging wildly across it as he did so. He stood there for a moment in the doorway, staring at Duo, who was slowly, ever so slowly, picking himself up to go. “Baka! Hayaku! Ikimasho!” Heero barked moodily at Duo. “Koko de matanai!”

Duo arched one brow and nodded his head once. “Uh huuuuh,” he hummed, giving Heero a very strange look, even worse than the one Heero had been giving Quatre earlier. “Right, whatever you say.” Still taking his sweet time, he muttered under his breath, “Weirdo....” He looked over at Quatre with a very venomous glare as he whispered harshly, “You plotted this.”

“He wants you to hurry up and go,” Trowa mentioned offhandedly as he took Heero’s now empty seat at the table. He had been trying to keep as far from the fray as possible, lingering in the doorway they had all entered the kitchen from while Heero and Duo held their screaming match across the room. “He also said you were stupid,” he threw in with a smirk, knowing it would get Duo storming after Heero like the plague. He shrugged at a very flummoxed Quatre nonchalantly, explaining, “Eh, it comes with living in the same house as the guy for three years.”

The sound of heavy combat boots pounding across the wood floor, angry door hinges and a clattering doorknob danced in Quatre’s eardrums as he stared at Trowa, still awed that he understood Japanese. There was a final punctuating door slam as Heero and Duo left for the garage out back, leaving Trowa and Quatre in much-wanted and needed silence. He glanced across the kitchen at the closed back door, just able to make Heero and Duo out as they stalked across the small back patio. There was enough space to drive a truck between them, Quatre noted, and he figured that was probably a good thing. They might be tempted to rip each others’ bowels out if they were any nearer to one another. The sight of the two of them acting like that made him very sad though. Despite all the violent anger his Sense always picked up whenever they fought, there was always this underlying stream of Nirvana that never seemed to go away no matter what. He wondered what it came from, found himself annoyed and confused when he thought about it, and settled on sighing loud and deep as he slumped onto the tabletop, closing his eyes in weariness.

“Daijobu ka, Quatre-kun?” Trowa asked with a soft smile, folding his hands on the table and lowering his chin atop them so he could be on the same level as Quatre. Quatre opened his eyes at the words and though he had no idea what Trowa had just said, he smiled. The corners of Trowa’s usually firm mouth lifted slightly at the sight and he went on speaking to Quatre in Japanese, sensing that hearing him speak the language charmed and cheered Quatre very much. “Nihongo o sugoi kangaru, ne? Heero wa yoku hanasu.” He smiled a bit wider, cocking his head slightly. “Ima, ore mo tokidoki nihongo o hansu!” He reached across the table and gave Quatre a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Genki da, Quatre-kun! Ii da, ne?”

Quatre soon forgot the war between Heero and Duo and found his mind focused solely on that present moment. Trowa just seemed to be so full of surprises and, like a magician at the circus, always ready to pull a new trick out of his hat whenever Quatre was feeling down. “Next thing you know, you’ll be conjuring rabbits,” Quatre finished the thought out loud with a lazy grin and hazed eyes.

“Nani? Doko de usagi da?” Trowa asked, his mind subconsciously still producing spoken words in Heero’s native tongue. He shook his head and raked a set of long bony fingers through his long bangs as he said again, this time in English, “What rabbits?”

Quatre chuckled, burrying his face in the sanctum of his arms to hide his blushing red face. His head was buzzing, reminding him very much of the one time Duo had managed to get him drunk and he hoped dearly that he did not say something in front of Trowa he might regret. He had gotten suckered into playing a truth-or-dare sort of game with Hilde, Dorothy and Duo after being threatened by the trio to have his finger sucking secret exposed to the entire school if he did not. He ended up in a head-to-head tie breaker with Dorothy, digging some rather interesting and embarrassing secrets out of each other as they battled for the title of winner. Meanwhile, Hilde and Duo had collapsed into a giggly huddle of kindergarten jokes after quite a few shots too many and were busy slurring variations of the ‘Miss Lucy’ song as they tried to play the hand game that went with it. (The two of them had started the game, soon to be joined by Dorothy, a long time before Quatre was dragged in, and they had managed to go through at least a bottle of scotch apiece.) In any case, Dorothy had come out the victor at the end of that, needless to say, leaving Quatre a sleeping baby in the middle of the floor, his thumb slipping between his rosy lips the second he hit the ground.

“It’s nothing. Just thinking out loud again,” he assured Trowa. “Never mind it.” He sealed it with another grin across the table.

“Oh yeah?” Trowa said, straightening up and rearranging his position, leaning a cheek in his palm. “What else are you thinking about there?”

A deafening crash echoed from the garage behind the house, soon to be drowned out by a sickeningly out-of-tune chorus of swears that was amplified enough for Trowa and Quatre to hear each and every word.

“I’m almost afraid to go over and find out,” Trowa said flatly, looking back towards the back door. “What could they possibly fight about now? As if there’s anything left for them to disagree about!”

“Well, at least they’re yelling out there instead of in my ear,” Quatre pointed out thankfully. His smile wavered and faded, “I wish Duo wouldn’t take Heero so harshly. He’s almost too careful and worried about people he thinks won’t understand him.”

“Really, now?” Trowa asked, seeming to find Quatre’s statement interesting. “Because I could swear that Heero was the exact same way.” Another crash resonated from the garage, making Trowa wince. “I don’t understand how two people could be so ridiculously similar and yet, completely different from one another.”

“I don’t know either,” Quatre said. “It’s a mystery.”

“You know, I first met Heero, he was hitchhiking on the side of the road in the middle of a rainstorm,” Trowa said nostalgically. Though Quatre was not quite sure where this had come from, he was more than willing to listen. Heero intrigued him for some reason. “I was so excited; I was sixteen and I had just gotten my driver’s license,” Trowa went on with a slight chuckle, his eyes glazed over in a very far-off memory. “We were all coming back from my grandfather’s and it was late and rainy. I was driving at the time and Cathy, my sister, was in the passenger seat. My parents were asleep in the back.” Trowa looked over his shoulder again and let out a long sigh. “Well anyway, we’re going down the road, when all of the sudden I noticed this shadowy figure standing in the rain with his thumb out. Even in my headlights, he still looked like a gloomy spectre that wasn’t even really there. Cathy didn’t like him right off and told me to keep driving. She said she thought he was strange.” Trowa turned around again to face Quatre as another chain of swearing arose from the behind the house, “Admittedly, Heero isn’t normal, but he’s not strange, if you know what I mean.”

“Heh, you tell Duo that,” Quatre commented softly as a particularly nasty comment from Duo came raging from the garage, not wanting to ruin the mood with his interruption.

“I couldn’t though,” Trowa went on, staring down at his hands. “Keep driving that is. He was all by himself in that pouring rainstorm, wearing only the clothes on his back, green tank top and a pair of black spandex bike shorts. Truth be told, he just looked so... sad standing there, like he was silently begging me not to pass him by, like there was somewhere he really needed to get to if his life depended on it. I remember thinking that it seemed like the sky was crying for him. My mom woke up when I slowed the car down. I think she noticed that look in his eye too, because she insisted that we bring him wherever he needed to go.”

“Did he ever tell you where?”

“No, he didn’t. Wherever it was, he never said, so I’m assuming he never got there. Maybe all he was trying to do was get away from whereever he was coming from,” Trowa answered. “He ended up riding all the way back here sitting between my parents, cold, wet and shivering. He never said anything for the whole trip except for a quiet ‘thank you’ when he got into the car and when my mom offered to let him stay the night at our house when we got back here.” Trowa smiled sadly again, looking for all the world like he might burst into tears. It touched Quatre’s heart visually and physically as his Sense echoed with the soft vibrations of Trowa’s soul. Trowa eloquently finished the story in a hushed tone, “And he’s never left.”

“Ah, so that’s why he’s still a ‘Yuy’, whoever the Yuys are,” Quatre hummed with understanding. “He’s not legally your parents’ ward, just lives here is all.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Trowa said, perking up a little bit, no longer lost in his memories. “But it’s not like that matters. He’s as much a part of this family as Cathy and I. He even calls my parents ‘O-tou-san’ and ‘O-kaa-san’ and sometimes calls me ‘Nii-chan’, even though I’m really not that much older than him.” Trowa paused, looking thoughtful for a second as he added, “But come to think of it, he’s never called Cathy ‘Imoto’, younger sister. They never really did get that close. Cathy still thinks Heero is a bit of a freak.”

Quatre let all that information sink in and filed it safely away in his head to bring it upfor analysis later. They went on chatting amiably with each other, Quatre insisting that he make something for the pair of them to eat while they waited for Duo. (Duo had made Quatre promise that he would not “leave him in the middle of enemy territory alone”.) By the time Trowa was cleaning up the plates after the best damn BLT he had ever eaten, it had been about an hour and there was still no word from either Heero or Duo.

“It’s been surprisingly quiet out there recently,” Trowa said, laying the last dish in its proper place and glancing out the window over the sink. “Maybe they killed each other.”

“That’s a bad joke and you know it Trowa!” Quatre tried hard to stifle the chuckles the comment had stirred.

Just then, the front door opened and a young girl’s voice called into the house, “Trowa? Is there any reason in particular Heero and Duo are stuck together in the garage?”

“Oh, Cathy, welcome home,” Trowa shouted back, walking from the kitchen to meet his sister in the front hall. “Yeah,” he went on, to answer her question as he led her back to Quatre in the kitchen, “Duo’s here to do some work on Heero’s Mini.”

“I know that,” Catherine rolled her eyes as she sat down next to Quatre at the table. “But why are they stuck together?”

“Quatre made Heero show Duo where the car was,” Trowa started, ready to launch into a whole explanation about the latest in the Heero/Duo War Chronicles.

“No, I mean literally stuck,” Catherine emphasized the word. “Even I think that’s going a little far, even for those two.” Apparently, Catherine was just about as fond of Duo as she was of her brother, which really did not say a whole lot by anyone’s books.

“What are you talking about?” Trowa demanded stepping purposefully towards the back door. He pulled it open and strode a couple of paces outside, a hand on each hip as he stared over at the garage. Lo and behold, standing right in the driveway, was none other than Heero and Duo, stuck to one another, just as Catherine said. Somehow, during all those crashes and swears he and Quatre had heard, Duo had managed to get wrapped up in his own braid, the tail of which was entangled with Heero’s belt buckle. His hand had been adhered one way or another to one of Heero’s sleeves, the same gooey bond keeping one of Heero’s hands glued firmly to the small of Duo’s back. Trowa had to admit that it was a pretty rare and hilarious sight, the pair of them were treading on each others’ toes as they fought to disentangle themselves but really not doing much more than making their situation worse. He knew that he had better do something quick, or there might be blood to scrub off the driveway soon. That certainly would not sit well with his father, who had just had the whole thing re-laid with brand new brick, so he motioned frantically for Quatre and quickly jogged over to help the struggling pair.

(x) X (x)

a/n: Chappy title is a Grateful Dead song, FYI, peoples.

This chappy’s early for two reasons. One, I feel bad that the other chappy was kinda short and also because Sakura03 asked for a post on her birthday, so here it is! Damn, I’m nice. Man, I do feel bad about what I’ve done to Catherine. I really like her, I really do, but I kinda had to evilize her for the sake of the story. Don’t worry, she’ll redeem herself, hehe.