Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 14
Here Is No Why

(x) X (x)

“Scar tissue that I wish you saw,
Sarcastic Mister Know-It-All.
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you ‘cause
With the birds I share....”

Duo awoke the next morning to the rush of rain hounding the poor tattered earth outside. He could hear the angry raindrops smacking loudly against the nearby window’s glass as if it were begging to come inside from the cold outdoors. He groaned as that annoying morning light whitened the serene black vision of sleep and brought him back to the world of the living.

“With the birds I share this lonely view and...
With the birds I share this lonely view....”

He was sure he was no longer dreaming, yet that same song was still being whispered softly in his head. He suddenly became very aware of the fact that he could feel an unfamiliar warmth spooned up behind him and a distinct hardness pressed against the small of his back. Soft pillowy lips slowly grazed the back of his neck as they moved with the words of the song, right beneath the tiny little wisps of hair at the nape of his neck that refused to weave into his braid. It soon set in that he was not laying on the floor of Meilan’s shop, where he was more than certain he had fallen asleep early that morning. In fact, he quickly realized, he was not laying on a floor of any kind, but in someone’s bed, with a warm blanket tossed over his hips and thighs. He tried to move away from this startling setting, only to find that a pair of strong arms were also clamped around him, one laying across his waist, the other tunneled between the mattress and his lower arm, its hand pressed protectively flat across his chest, a powerful leg wound around his, pinning him on that mattress until his sleeping keeper awoke.

“Shitshitshitshitshit,” was the first string of coherent English that ran through Duo’s mind once he had gathered his wits and his eyes were wide open with the shock of early morning irritability. “Bet Solo managed to hunt me down after all and took his non-monetary payment.... Fuck me....”

But a closer look at his surroundings quickly ruled that conclusion out. The room had gray-painted walls and a creamy white carpet thrown over its hardwood floor. The furniture was all heavy mahogany wood with spindly carvings and detail, the blankets, pillows and such all of golds, dark reds, silvers and other such steely earth tones. Two windows, rather close to one another, were hung with scarlet, velvet curtains from black iron rods. A desk sat on the other side of the room, opposite the bed, everything neatly organized around a closed-down iBook, as if the whole thing was some sort of shrine to the brilliant little machine. Other white computer components, such as an external zip drive, an array of plug-ins, a scanner and a printer, were scattered about the smooth cherry surface. Simple water-colours and ink prints were hung in simple frames here and there, just to make the wall seem less like a wide expanse of dead space.

No, if he had been ambushed by the White Fang boys, there was no way he would have woken up in a plush four-poster bed. He had noticed that over the years, White Fang seemed to have lost its knack for thieving and stealth, resorting more to just plain old acts of violence, mostly against mutants, of course. In fact, the only member of White Fang who had ever had the talent for breaking into even the most secure of homes had been Duo himself, and obviously he was no longer a part of their ranks. He felt consoled that he was not in any immediate danger, figuring that if they had gotten to him, he probably would have awoken on the side of the street, half naked and with a definite, screaming pain in his ass. Those bastards liked to play way rougher than anything like this.

A hollow knock suddenly peeled through the room. Duo tried to lift his head but found that it was still heavy with the lethargy of sleep, opting to just let it crash back down into the nest of soft pillows on the bed. The person holding him stirred slightly, his arms loosening a bit as a low, purring groan rumbled against the back of Duo’s neck. For some reason, the sensation made Duo kind of giddy, and he had to fight hard to ignore the pleasurable vibrations undulating beneath the root of his braid.

“Hey, are you awake?” a voice, presumably the knocker outside of the room, called as another series of bangs played across the door. Duo knew he had heard that voice somewhere before. “For God’s sake, it’s almost lunchtime!”

After hearing the person outside speak again, it clicked in his mind where he had heard that voice, and the realization made his insides freeze over.

...Trowa....

“The day’s not going to stop for you!”

And if that was Trowa, then that meant that there was a pretty good chance that the person who was currently wrapped around him was....

“Nrrgh, alright, I’m getting up,” came Heero’s low growling voice, his breath playing with the loose hairs shooting every which way from the remains of Duo’s terribly mussed braid.

The springs whined quietly as the bed dipped down heavily with Heero’s movements, his arms and leg slowly pulled from around Duo. That warmth was no longer pressed against him and left him feeling surprisingly cold and shivery. Duo rolled over into the warm spot where Heero had just been lying with a frightened and angry growl, burrying his face into another one of the many feathery pillows scattered across the bed. Smells like vanilla and creme, his gourmet nose said quietly under its breath to his watchful brain in hopes that the greater Duo would not take any heed while it preoccupied itself with spying on Heero from the hidden safety of the bed.

“I don’t know why you’re just standing out there,” Heero said as he neared the door.

Just to let Duo’s nose know that they had been paying attention, his eyes made good note of the way Heero looked wearing only a pair of black spandex bike shorts, as well as the intricate wings tattooed across the small of his back, spreading out from the base of his spine, feathery tips resting on his hipbones. They also made an added comment about how his hair looked kind of sexy when it was even messier and out of order than it usually was, right out of bed like that. And just so they would not be left out of the loop, the always listening Maxwell ears threw in how nice Heero’s voice was, still just as gravelly as ever. Duo supposed that the fact that the boy had just rolled out of bed did nothing to change his tone. Ever.

“It’s locked, stupid,” Trowa’s flat deadpan voice came from the hallway outside Heero’s door. “What am I ‘sposed to do?”

“Bet it’s not,” Heero answered smugly, a hand resting on one hip as he came to a halt about two feet away from the door. “Open it.”

“Goddammit, Heero, your door sucks,” Trowa sputtered, the sound of a creaky doorknob being turned leaking through the old rusty keyhole. “I hate your jokes.”

Heero just shrugged, crossing his arms as he stared at his brother quizzically. Trowa shook his head, his long bangs swishing across his one hidden eye with the movement. He turned, as if he were going to go back downstairs, when he noticed something on the way out. “Heero?” he queried, pausing in his retreat as he looked back over his shoulder at his brother. He arched an eyebrow, flicking his dark emerald eyes in the direction of the heavy mahogany bed on the other side of the small room.

“The fold-out sofa is crap,” Heero answered quickly, his voice brisk and abrupt. “I wasn’t going to just leave the slob in the middle of the floor.”

“So there is a heart in there,” Trowa retorted with a sly smirk, giving Heero a jab in the ribs.

“Shut up,” Heero said, turning away to stare up at the ceiling as he batted Trowa’s hand away. “He was cluttering up Meilan’s tidy shop. I’d just cleaned the place too.”

“Yeah. Right.” Trowa’s smirk became wider, as he resumed his journey out of the room. He leaned in the door frame for a moment as he threw another comment at Heero, an obvious stab at revenge for all the little taunting Heero had given him about Quatre. “I’m sure that’s what it is... you being such a neat-freak and all.”

Duo watched them banter from inside the soft fortress of pillows and blankets he had built up around himself. One large, blinking indigo eye peeked out from between the folds of all that material, mentally noting everything that was playing out before him, like a reeling camera. What the hell is going on here? he wondered as he observed the two brothers. He carried me all the way from Nataku’s? ...Because he didn’t want me to sleep on the floor? Wha~at? I didn’t even know he was there!

The sound of Heero closing the door jolted Duo out of his inner mutterings. Duo watched as Heero started back for the bed, unsure of whether or not his heart was pounding on account of fear, anger, or some other emotion entirely. He thought that Heero’s intended target was the tall bureau sitting adjacent to the bed, but was startled when he realized that Heero was crawling back into bed. Duo pressed his face deeper into the pillow, guessing that Heero probably thought he was still sleeping. He had yet to decide if that was a good card to play or not. Fright and a twinge of habitual anger started to boil inside of him when he felt Heero’s arms slide back around him, similar to how he had been when he had initially woken up. Heero’s slim, powerful form curled up against his back again, pulling him close like a great, big teddy bear and securing him in his possession with the leg that he hooked over Duo’s thighs.

What... the... hell.... Duo was scared. Very, very scared. Here he was, curled up in Heero Yuy’s bed, in Heero Yuy’s ams, no less! This is wrong, Duo tried to berate himself. Heero Yuy is my social enemy! I can’t be cuddling up with him! This is the man I hate. Hate, remember? You hate him, Duo! He tried to roll himself free of Heero’s embrace, but found that his limbs were wrought of unyielding steel that kept him in place. A tired growl rumbled against the base of his neck as he squirmed and the arms tightened around him even more. Gotta run, Duo! Gotta hide! he kept pushing upon himself, trying to drown out reminders of those little observations his senses had made about Heero a bit earlier on. It did not help that his sense of touch was currently attacking him with millions of pin-pricks all over his body that screamed every detail about the contours of Heero’s body.

It was enough to make his mutated DNA jittery, threatening to split and race off in a zillion different directions whether he liked it or not. Things like this usually tended to happen when Duo fell into fight-or-flight mode, which tended to end up as just plain flight. Duo had always been of the state of mind that it was better to run away and live to fight another day. A series of bad experiences, scars here and there and a hell-hole full of unpleasant shit from a pretty grim street life tended to do that to a person.

It took every shred of self-control Duo had ever even glimpsed in his entire life-span to not let his mutation screw him royally in the ass when Heero (fast asleep again) decided to roll over a bit, pinning the braided boy firmly beneath his powerful frame. Though Heero was not lying on top of him with very much pressure or weight at all, Duo felt as if the wind was slowly being crushed out of him as he was flattened into a two-dimensional figure. His eyes grew wide in panic, catching sight of his fingers as they slowly began to sift outwards in lazy tendril clouds in an effort to escape from this strange predicament. The added worry certainly did not help center Duo’s concentration, but he fought hard to do it, and after a few seconds of hiding behind squinted-shut eyes, gnawing away at his lip and trying his damndest to ignore the gentle rhythms of Heero’s stomach as it fluttered against his back with his gentle slumbering breathing, he finally had the focus and the strength to force Heero off his back. Once free, Duo wasted no time in scooting as far to the other side of the bed as he could, clutching and rubbing himself as if he had been stung by some venomous wasp.

Unconsciously, Heero seemed to have noticed a change and stirred a little, his dark brown eyebrows furrowing and twitching as if he was in discomfort. An agitated frown creased his lips as his pretty face scrunched a little, his nose crinkled in distaste as an irritated morning groan whistled between his lips as his eyes snapped open. Suddenly, Duo had a distinct feeling like he was caught in the crosshairs of a sniper scope.

They stared each other down in tense silence for about a minute, achieving record time for prolonging both verbal banter and physical attacks. Heero started to rise up onto his arms, twitching in such a flash of movement, it seemed like he had flickered from one position to another, eyes still locked on Duo with that ambiguous and unnerving darkness. The moment Duo sensed Heero’s shifting, he wasted no time in reacting, darting over the other side of the bed with all the grace and speed of a frightened kitten, though his feet got tangled in the sheets on the way over, landing him flat on his nose as he tumbled over the edge of the bed. Two suspicious round plum-like eyes surfaced from behind the mattress’ horizon, peering out from behind messy spikes of malleable chestnut bangs.

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Yuy,” Duo finally managed to bite out, initiating the start of one of their traditional arguments. “If this is some kind of sick joke, I’d like to know it. I hate being on the wrong end of a prank, and if that’s what this happens to be, I think you’ll soon learn why everyone at school fears the infamous Maxwell revenge.”

Heero was silent, staring at Duo brazenly, his lips still drawn in that unhappy frown. Duo was starting to think that the expression was something that the Japanese boy put on in front of the mirror every morning, when he got ready for the day.

“The joke is getting less and less funny with each second,” Duo updated flatly, daring to lift himself up enough so that his nose was just peeping up from behind the mattress. “And as this failed to ever be funny in the first place, I’m assuming that you’ve hit negative chuckle points.”

He was still answered by nothing but that blank stare and silence.

Duo started to get a little frustrated as he popped up even more, sinking his elbows moodily into the mattress and leaning forward to glare back at Heero. “I’m more than a little annoyed now, Yuy,” he said gruffly, frowning back at him in an effort to mirror that lurid glare. “Either you start telling me what the hell I’m doing in your room, or I start making up my own story and passing it around. You choose.”

At last, Heero’s lips moved to form words, though that really did not do much to change his facial expression. “Oh?” he asked, “And what would your version be?”

That certainly caught Duo off-guard. Though he had made the threat, that certainly did not mean that he had thought it out that far. If anything, it had just been something to say, for the hell of saying it and to make sure he had the first move, the upper-hand and the illusion of control in the conversation. Duo greatly disliked being in a position of submission.

“Well I’m sure even you have the imagination to figure it out,” Duo spilled out after a brief, nervous pause. “What do you think a guy’d say, waking up with the captain of the lacrosse team? ‘Specially when said guy hates said captain!” He threw the last bit in the mix for spite and emphasized it so that it got stuck in Heero’s throat like a dirty wad of damp, old socks.

“I’m sorry for that,” Heero said quietly, his lack of response making Duo even more upset. This just-out-of-bed Heero was a whole new character in and of himself. Another customary short silence ensued before Heero spoke up again, still reclined on his side as his swirling eyes raked Duo over passively. “I just thought that perhaps the reason you’re always so damn cynical all the time might have something to do with breaking into shops to sleep on the floor at the ungodly hours of the morning so you wouldn’t have to go home. I suppose that has nothing to do with it though, since you seem to be the same old Duo anyway.”

“You are definitely tripping on something, Yuy,” Duo curled his upper lip and turned his head away slightly, quirking an eyebrow as he watched the reclining Heero from the corners of his eyes. Sparkling wine-drunken purple orbs danced away from the sight almost immediately; it was hard to be angry at someone who looked like some kind of brown sugar treat, dripping with caramal and dark chocolate all across the sheets. “Guys like you don’t like guys like me and they never take the time to worry about their well-being or even their lives for that matter. It’s against the rules.”

“Rules? What rules?” Heero scoffed, tossing his head slightly. Duo could have sworn he had seen the corners of Heero’s mouth quirk upwards a bit, but then he figured it must have only been an illusion his mind had made up from straining to see out of the corner of his eye.

“There are always rules,” Duo drawled with a roll of his eyes to relieve them from the strain of focusing them oddly to the side. “You, Mr. Sports, should know that. Don’t you live your life like a game? I think I heard your darling brother saying that once.”

“Rules were meant to be broken,” Heero answered smugly, his voice woven with a hint of... something. He sat up straight and stretched, his body singing a chorus of popping joints, before he slid off the other side of the bed, at last making for the chest of drawers to get dressed. Duo made absolutly certain he was not paying attention to the strangely enticing movements, even though the truth was he was watching the Japanese boy’s every action.

“I should have known you’d think something stupid like that,” Duo ground out, maintaining his spot, crouched on the other side of the bed. “You never struck me as someone who’d hold rules sacred. You’d break ‘em so long as it suits you... and I’m still confused as to why I’m here.”

Heero then did something that Duo did not know he was even capable of. He laughed. Really, really laughed. “Ha! And I should have known you’d say something stupid like that,” Heero retorted with a wicked grin, spinning around with more energy than Duo had ever seen in the other boy, a pair of faded blue jeans clutched tight in one hand. “Your problem, Duo Maxwell, is that you got caught up in playing the game way too early and you don’t know how to stop. The rules have you better than they have me.”

“Stop that!” Duo shouted, finally snapping up to his feet, pounding his fists hard against his thighs. “Stop acting so damn high-and-mighty, like you know it all! You don’t know jack shit about me, and you never will!” He jerked a thumb to the side, gesturing to the room around him. “Preppy little rich boy comes from a house like this,” he sneered. “The hell could you ever know what it’s like to be me!?”

“Break the rules and you might find out,” Heero answered flatly, returning to the bureau. He pulled out another drawer and fished around in its depths for a moment, before pulling out a baggy gray sweatshirt. From another drawer came a white tee-shirt and a pair of socks. He efficiently closed the drawers and went about the business of getting dressed.

Duo kept his eyes elsewhere. First, he did not want Heero to see his eyes, knowing that they betrayed his mask like sniveling little traitors, as he mulled over what had just happened and what to do next. Second, and more obvious, was that he did not want to be caught up staring at Heero while he changed, and used that pretense to cover up his initial reason for hiding his face. He was pretty sure he had not seen Heero take out a fresh pair of boxers or another set of those biking shorts, and he knew damn well what the implications of that were.

“Look, if you’re just going to sit there and be a moody son of a bitch, then go on,” Heero’s voice pierced through his head a little later. Duo’s eyes instinctively darted in his direction, noted that Heero was now dressed in the clothes he had taken out, the spandex shorts he had been sleeping in balled up in one hand. He quickly went back to staring at the other wall, as he had been before. He heard the floorboards creak as Heero moved towards the door. “I do have things to do today. Let me know when you want to be agreeable.” The sentence was punctuated with a very moody slam of the door, suggesting that there was more brewing under Heero’s placid demeanor than he had been willing to show to Duo.

“He’ll bite his lip, but he won’t show his heart,” Duo grumbled to himself, waiting for the sound of Heero’s footsteps in the hall to fade away before he made the move to leave. “Heh, good luck and goodbye,” he whispered to the room as he gently pulled the door closed behind him with his exit. “Carry on.”

(x) X (x)

a/n: Sorry the chappy’s short, but it didn’t quite go with the last part, nor does it quite go with the next, so... there you go! I’d meant to post it earlier, but lots of... uh... stuff... got in the way. The title is a Smashing Pumpkins song about gloomy teens. Of course you all should know the insert song, Scar Tissue, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yay!

Anyways, if you haven’t yet, go check my website! There’s a brand new layout and some other new stuff. Still some bugs I’m trying to sort out, but still. What would you think if I started hosting a ‘fic contest? Anyone up for the idea?

Sugar and thanks to all who’ve been reading and enjoying this so far.