Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 16
Fuck You (An Ode to No One)

(x) X (x)

“Duo,” a far-off voice called, barely heard even in the empty, imposing silence between the braided boy’s ears. It was not until his name was repeated again, a bit harsher this time, and a strong hand fell down heavily on his shoulder, that he was jarred out of his purposefully flat and mundane thinking.

“Wha-a-a!?” Duo jumped a few inches off the wooden bench he was sitting on in the school’s outdoor quad area. He almost accidentally flung the hardcover book he was reading over his head and into the face of the person behind him, whose fast reactions were the only things that saved him from getting into a fight with ‘Great Expectations’ and losing. Calming his edgy nerves, Duo turned around to face whoever was behind him, trying his hardest to make himself seem as cool and in control as he usually appeared to be. Ever since that incident where he had awoken in Heero’s bed, he had found certain troubles in keeping his jester’s mask straight and his harlequin’s costume in order. “Man, Treize, don’t sneak up on a guy like that!” Duo gasped, lowering his book back down to the safety of his lap. “You nearly scared shit out of me!”

“I think I did scare the shit out of you,” Treize laughed amiably, leaning down on the bench’s curled around back. He patted Duo on the back somewhat gruffly, causing an ill cough to scrape at the back of Duo’s throat, “Boy, you seem really on edge there, Duo. Did pod people beam down from their mother ship and steal your mind away? You seem like you’re in a zone.”

...Only pod people did beam down and steal my brain--when they took over Heero Yuy’s body and transformed him into a poetry-spewing stalker, Duo thought to himself cynically. His brows furrowed in a disgruntled knot over his pert, elfish nose as he frowned down at the Dickens novel resting in his lap. Now every time I close my freaking eyes, all I see is him. He’s all over the fucking place and won’t leave me alone!

“Duo....” Treize’s voice came calling after him again, dragging him back to reality. When his vision came back, he was greeted by a flickering peach mass, which he eventually deduced to be Treize’s hand as he waved it back and forth in front of his eyes. “Earth to Duo: wake up in there! I keep losing you here!”

“What? Oh, sorry.” Duo shook his head and refocused his attention on the present, trying hard to keep himself grounded. Another thing he had noticed was a decreased number in the times that his nervous twitches and anxiousness made him lose control over his mutation. Really the only times that he would switch forms now would be when he chose it or whenever he sneezed (he was still getting over that flu he had come down with during last week’s rainstorm).

“You free this period?” Treize asked with an amused chuckle, shaking his head at Duo’s inattentiveness.

“Yeah, why?”

“I’ve got some kids making up a of couple missed classes right now,” Treize explained, watching as a dragonfly started flitting around in circles above Duo’s head. Duo was too busy staring resolutely forward, focused unblinkingly at the leaky water fountain on the opposite end of the courtyard to pay the insect any notice as it landed on top of his head. “And, well, you can probably figure what I need you for. You can... still read if you want to.”

“Yeah.... Yeah, sure,” Duo answered distractedly. The dragonfly took flight again and resettled on the tip of Duo’s nose. Duo’s eyes narrowed as he crossed them, trying to direct a death glare down his nose at it, but only ended up looking funny. When the dragonfly refused to budge, Duo got annoyed at the poor bug and swung his palm around to whack it, but missed, and ended up smacking himself in the face. “Owwwwwww!” he moaned nasally, dropping his book unceremoniously to the ground and cupping both hands over his nose in pain.

“Only you, Duo, only you,” Treize grinned, clapping him heartily on the shoulder enough to make Duo forget his nose for a moment. “I’ll see you upstairs, okay?” he said as he started to head back towards the school building. “Thanks, Duo.”

“Anytime,” he answered distractedly as he bent over to retrieve his lost book. He straightened upright again and watched Treize walk off, realizing that by agreeing to model for Treize’s class again, there was a pretty good chance that he would have to deal with Heero. Though he had pretty much turned arguing with Heero into a fine art form, he still had yet to deal with him since that whole morning bedroom incident. He was not quite sure how he was going to be able to handle it, especially after having a dream as wet as the one he’d had the night before. Deciding that he would figure out how to go about it when the moment presented itself, Duo stood up, tucking his Dickens’ novel under one arm and headed the same direction Treize had just gone. He knew that said moment was going to be a bastard though, especially when just passing Trowa in the hall on his way up to the arts loft managed to get him worked up on the matter all over again.

When he walked into the room, Treize was already there, sitting at his drafting table in the corner of the room and going over some large charcoal drawings in silence while the rest of the class concentrated on their current assignment. Duo looked to the middle of the room to see, surprisingly enough, Heero Yuy himself curled loosely on a mountainous bed of pillows thrown across the floor inside the circle of students set up with their drawing boards all around him. Duo smirked to himself as he entered the room, stepping up behind Meilan, whose chair was closest to the door, and looked over her shoulder to see how she was faring. She seemed to have taken a keen focus on certain parts of Heero’s body, the large gray piece of paper clipped to her drawing board covered with rather in-depth sketches, mostly of his hands and eyes. One or two were of his ears and sloppy bangs, and even a few of his nose and mouth, which excellently captured the obvious dislike the Japanese teen had for his situation. He watched her for a few moments in earnest, watching with a surprising amount of interest as her hands worked across the page, various strokes from both her blackened fingers and her soft, crumbly stick of charcoal melding together to create her beautiful works of art. Meilan, Duo decided after observing her for a while, was very good at drawing.

“Oh, Duo, great!” Treize said merrily when he finally looked up from his desk and noticed Duo standing behind Meilan. He stood up and started walking around the perimeter of the circle towards Duo, calling out to Heero as he moved. “All right, you’ve paid your dues. You can....” He trailed off and came to a halt, looking down his arm at the work of the student sitting in front of him. “Wait, never mind; I lied. You’ll have to hold out a little longer until Wufei finishes,” he said, changing his mind. He waved a decisive hand at Heero, who scowled at the changed command and sat back down on the pillows with a very pronounced sense of discontent.

“Keep up the good work, Wufei,” Treize said meanwhile, patting Wufei on the shoulder as he spoke. “Every time I see your stuff, it’s always getting better.” The compliment actually brought forth a smug grin of self-contented pride to Wufei’s lips as he silently went on with his drawing. Treize stood there, debating something in his head for a moment, before coming to a decision and halting Wufei in his drawing again. “Duo,” Treize said, looking up to address the braided boy, who was still lingering behind Meilan on the other side of the room, “go find a spot next to Heero.” Leaving his instructions for Duo at that, he went back to Wufei and gestured to something down on his paper. “Look at this big, empty space here. See if you can work Duo into the drawing with Heero so it doesn’t seem like he’s just floating there in the middle of the page. This little sketch has real potential to be a very beautiful finished piece.”

Wufei wrinkled his brow as he tried to figure out a way to follow up on Treize’s suggestion, his eyes jumping from his drawing board to the pair sitting in the middle of the room as Treize moved on around the circle to see what the rest of the class was up to. “Move closer to him, Maxwell,” he finally said, making a scooting gesture with one hand. “I can’t fit you into the drawing with that much space between you.” He paused, watching as Duo looked up to send a glare in Wufei’s direction and moved about an inch towards Heero, not doing much for the distance between them. “No, more than that. Come on, Maxwell, it’s not like he’s got the plague or anything.” Duo scowled again and huffily made a production of moving another inch or so before snogging his nose defiantly in the pages of his book.

//She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy.
//”You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked on. “She says many hard things of you, yet you say nothing of her. What do you think of her?”
//”I don’t like to say,” I stammered.
//”Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.
//”I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.//

Unbeknownst to Wufei, and just about everyone else in the universe, Duo did not trust himself around Heero; he was afraid of either embarrassing himself with certain aspects of his anatomy or ripping the guy’s head off in fear, anger and frustration that they were breathing the same oxygen. One way or another, the results were not something that Duo was willing to give much thought to. “That’s as far as I go, Chang,” Duo stated firmly, looking up from his Dickens when he was seated on the cushion adjacent to the ones Heero was currently reclined upon. He moodily went back to reading, finding it hard to go back to the story with the same attitude he had before, now that he was so riled, not only because of Heero, but Wufei too, for ordering him around like he was.

//”Anything else?”
//”I think she is very pretty.”
//”Anything else?”
//”I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a look of supreme aversion.)
//”Anything else?”
//”I think I should like to go home.”
//“And never see her again, though she is pretty?”
//”I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should like to go home now.”
//“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham aloud. “Play the game out.”//

“Oh for God’s sake, I’m getting sick of how everything has to be a huge ordeal with you two!” Wufei snapped at him irately, his short temper getting the better of him. His voice was very serious and a little bit scary as well as he ordered Duo to move again; “Sit behind him and lean your weight against his side so I can get you into my drawing. I swear to everything holy, Maxwell, if you don’t just fucking do it, I’ll chew you out so bad, you’ll never want to show your face within a six hundred mile radius of this town.” He smirked darkly as he added: “Besides, it’s not like you don’t want to.”

Worrying about dodging the flapping copy of Great Expectations that came flying from Duo’s hands did a very good job of drawing Wufei’s attention away from the nervous swallow that sunk down Duo’s throat as he complied with the young art student’s order. Heero just seemed as unemotional and stony as usual as Duo moved closer and took the position Wufei had told him to, even when Duo rested an elbow on the dip hollowed out between his hips and his ribcage. Duo, robbed of the distraction of his book since he had thrown it at Wufei, tried hard to keep his mind on something far-off and preferably disgusting, like the student government’s president, Relena, who seemed to think her cheer leading wiles were going to get her a boyfriend of any kind.

“There, perfect,” Wufei said, making damn sure they heard him sigh in frustration at all the trouble it took for such a simple task. “That was certainly a process. Now don’t you dare move, or I’ll kill you both.”

“Wufei, there is no need for such hostile language in my class,” Treize’s voice came from the other side of the room, his eyes directed sternly at the trio. “Same goes to you two as well; keep it in your heads. Some people are actually trying to work.”

They were interrupted from any further discussion on the matter by a knock on the plaster wall just outside the classroom door. “Dorothy?” Duo exclaimed in surprise when he noticed who was standing there. “What are you doing here?”

“Can I help you?” Treize asked as the blonde haired girl stepped into the room.

“Yes, I just wanted to know the details about this afternoon’s lacrosse match,” she explained, lingering in that spot by the door, right behind Meilan. Dorothy, just like Duo, soon found herself caught up in watching Meilan draw--she had taken to working on a smaller version of the setup of Heero and Duo that Wufei was currently slaving over. “For Zechs Marquise,” she clarified when she was met with a few seconds of silence more than she expected to be normal.

Quivering vibrations undulating underneath his elbow drew Duo’s attention from Dorothy to the form reclined beside him. Obviously, Heero seemed to find something amusing about Dorothy’s query, though he was doing a fair job of keeping whatever was happening behind those glassy eyes of his limited to a few soft chuckles and a private smirk.

“My, I thought I had told everyone about the schedule change!” Treize slapped his forehead as he rushed around to his desk and pulled out the chair, sitting in it. Grabbing a pen, he scrawled out the information as he relayed it across the room to Dorothy. “It’s an away game at four in the afternoon, against OZ,” he said, folding the paper and delivering it to the blonde girl, who smiled in that disturbing, demonic way of hers when she took it from him. “You tell Marquise that he’s lucky to have friends as nice as you, who will go running all across the school to find out the information he’s too lazy to keep track of himself.”

“I’ll tell him that,” she replied, that same haughty grin still pinned flagrantly across her face as she turned to go. “Thanks, coach!” She scampered around the corner and out of sight, down the hall.

“Stop laughing,” Duo reprimanded Heero coolly, still feeling his light nasal snickers shaking beneath his arm. “Dorothy is one of my good friends!”

“Is that so?” Heero asked sarcastically as he rolled over onto his back, his tone suggesting that he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, it’s so,” Duo snapped, turning his entire body around so he could get a better angle at Heero while he started off on yet another one of their same, old same-olds.

“I thought I told you not to fucking move!” Wufei bellowed from off to the side, his crackling anger and annoyance practically making noises as he started reaching his rope’s end. “You both are fucking annoying enough alone! Together, you’re like the fucking Olympians warring the Titans, and the battle is getting damn out of hand!”

“Which do you want to be: an Olympian or a Titan?” Duo asked Heero flatly, his voice smug and oozing with that usual Maxwell cynicism.

“An Olympian,” Heero answered almost automatically, folding his arms behind his head and kicking one leg across the other, crossing them at the thighs, “because they’re the ones who win.”

“Ha, ha, very funny,” Duo sneered with that same tone as before. He found that the more he got into these ritual tiffs with Heero, the less he actually thought about them, and the less he questioned, which, he decided, was much better for all parties concerned. There was a certain safety in the tradition, and Duo liked hiding with that kind of security in mind. “I’m surprised you even knew who the hell old Wu-cakes was even talking about. Merits for using brain cells no one ever knew you had.”

“Glad to know where I stand in your favour,” Heero replied blandly, closing his eyes, his foot twitching back and forth, as if to the beat of some song that was playing a private concert for only him. “Make me a certificate and I’ll hang it up on my wall.”

“I wouldn’t waste a tree for the paper to do it,” Duo clipped back tartly, more annoyed by Heero’s lax demeanor than anything the Japanese boy had actually said, “though your room could sorely use the decoration!”

“Great. You can be an interior designer.”

“Yeah, like you do so much better!” Duo bit back. Heero seemed all too calm, considering how boiled Duo’s own blood was, and his retorts were coming much quicker and far more wittily than Duo had ever expected them to. Maybe there really was more to Heero Yuy than he had.... No, he told himself resolutely, gritting his teeth as he stared heatedly down at the beautiful figure stretched out on the pillows beside him. Don’t even start to travel down that road, Maxwell. It’s not worth digging your own grave and getting stuck in it.

So, in traditional Duo form, he started talking to fill what he deemed to be an awkward and dangerous silence, hoping to navigate as far away from that one course of thought as possible. “What’d you do, get your mother to choose out those reds and colours for your room?” Duo attacked scathingly, hoping to get as much punch in one go as he could. ‘Hit fast, many times and run’ had always been his best plan of attack, and living with such a mentality had been elemental in keeping his scrawny butt in one piece over the years. “Or maybe it was darling brother, Trowa. Ha, you probably had to have him hang your curtains up ‘cause your so goddamn little. Bet the only reason you moved in with his family was ‘cause he can reach all the top shelves--”

“Duo?” Heero cracked an eye open, his sudden use of the Duo’s first name cutting the mechanic short in his verbal attack.

“...yeah?” Duo’s voice was small and meek, as if he had not expected to hear the word come from Heero’s mouth in his entire life. He was not sure he had ever heard the Japanese youth ever say his name quite like that before, or if he had even ever said his first name at all.

“Shut up.”

“Oh.” Duo’s face became a visage of twisted cheer as the lights faded from his purple irises and one corner of his smiling mouth started to twitch involuntarily. “Well, in that case, if you don’t mind, I’ll return to my critique of your room--WHAT NOW!?” He whirled around to face Wufei, whose indiscreet cough had been the interruption this time.

“Two things,” Wufei said, his expression somewhere between amused and outright pissed. “First,” he held up two fingers and then folded one down, “just when were you ever in Heero’s bedroom?” This was certainly where the smirk on Wufei’s face was coming from, because as he said it, aforementioned smirk simply blossomed into an outright maniacal grin. “I mean, you seem to know so much about it....”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Right, right, whatever. We’ll have to chat,” Wufei’s grin flickered for a second, implying that he was getting to the thing that was causing that pissed-off look to lace his features. There was a pause, and then he said in a dangerously calm tone: “If either of you two assholes move another inch, I swear to God I’ll fucking--”

“WUFEI!” Treize’s voice cut from behind, the sudden volume and proximity causing the Chinese boy to cringe and shrivel up in his seat. “I thought I told you not to make threats like that in my class!”

“But Sir,” Wufei was practically whining to his teacher, twisting around in the chair so he could direct a pathetic looking face up at the gingery haired lacrosse coach, “they’re the ones being difficult! I’m just a victim of circumstance, I swear!”

“Ooh, would you just look at Justice Boy go,” Duo muttered cynically under his breath to no one in particular, though Heero smirked widely at the comment.

“Wufei, how long is that excuse going to work?” Treize asked, his voice very serious and calm. “You said the exact same thing about Heero after your injury last year and you and I both know that you were just as responsible for the whole accident as he was!”

Wufei seemed to know that he had been defeated and turned back around in his chair, sulking very visibly. Meilan sure did not seem to look very happy with Wufei’s particular choice in behaviour at that precise moment, and the look on her face sure as hell showed it. Duo hoped he would be around to see her kick Wufei’s ass after class; God knew that the pretentious Chinese boy had it coming for quite some time.

When the bell rang about ten minutes later, the class made pretty quick tracks. Heero was gone in less than a heartbeat, which was quite a feat as the Japanese boy had practically been dreaming for the remainder of the entire period. After cleaning up, Meilan had just about dragged Wufei by the scruff of his neck out the door; Duo could still hear the faint echoes of her lecture to Wufei floating from down the hall. Just as Duo was going to pick up his book from where it had landed on the floor, behind the chair Wufei had been sitting in, Treize said something that made Duo freeze right on the spot.

“So what’s this I hear about you and Heero? Something about him bringing you home in the middle of the night? And I hear you’ve been hired to do work on his car,” Treize had a look on his face that suggested that his mind had run to places with the story that Duo really did not want to consider his teacher going. “I suppose things are getting better between the two of you then?”

“It’s.... That was... I mean,” Duo stammered, scratching the back of his slim neck, braid swinging across the back of his wrist as he did so. He gathered up his nerve and said more firmly, “It was a misunderstanding on that dumb-ass Trowa’s part. Should’ve never happened.”

“Now, now,” Treize made a stifling gesture with one hand, waving it up and down in Duo’s direction. He picked up the stack of drawings produced during the class period and carried them to a filing cabinet sitting underneath one of the room’s dormitory windows and proceeded to tuck each one into the drawer of its proper artist. “I heard this all from Trowa himself, and from what he says, he thinks it’s getting better.”

“Proves he’s a dumb-ass,” Duo muttered under his breath. “I still don’t understand what Q sees in him at all.”

“What was that?”

“Whoops, uh, nothing!” Duo fretted, covering his mouth. He had been unable to tell whether or not the tone in Treize's voice had been friendly to the type of relationship he had just suggested the goalie had with Quatre. “Just muttering to myself. Anything for a laugh, right?” He started chuckling nervously.

“If you think I’m shocked by Trowa and that Winner kid being all googly-eyed with each other, you’re wrong,” Treize said with a calm smile, closing one thin drawer and opening another, laying the next drawing on his stack inside. “Besides, if you had such a huge problem with it--”

“And I do!” Duo interrupted bitterly. He paused, thought about what he had just said, and amended slightly, “Well, that is, I don’t mind if Q digs other guys. What I do mind is him digging guys like Barton!”

“And just why is that?” Treize asked, closing the drawer and turning around so he could face the braided boy point blank. It seemed that half the reason Treize had wanted him to come up for the period was to get to this point one way or another, even more so than actually sitting in as a model, and it was so dreadfully obvious that even Duo could figure it out with no particular exercise of his lazy common sense. “I mean, really, Duo,” Treize leaned back on the filing cabinet, absently flicking through the stack of charcoal drawings as he spoke, “Trowa’s a nice guy. What’s your problem with him? It’s not like he’s done anything to you. From what I hear, he and your best friend are like this.” He crossed his fingers to indicate what he meant.

“The only thing Trowa Barton ever did to me was deciding to be Heero Yuy’s best friend!” Duo snarled vehemently, standing with a hand clamped harshly on each hip as he stared down at the floor, directing his angry stare at his innocent and undeserving book, which still lay open and face down beside his feet. “I can’t fucking take idiots like that. You know, the kinds who think that a preposition is when you go to school away from home, the male bimbos and the sluts. Hate ‘em all.”

“Hate? Hate’s a strong emotion, Duo,” Treize chided softly, turning himself slightly so he could return to filing away the artwork and still maintain good eye contact with Duo. He felt he was finally getting somewhere with the kid; the sort of somewhere Une had previously mentioned to him that she had hoped this whole lacrosse experience would drag Duo, even if it meant dealing with him kicking, screaming, whining and fighting the entire way. “You’re not a hateful person, I don’t think.”

“You’d be really fucking surprised then, Sir,” Duo spat, his visage taking on a very dark and disturbing sort of expression, his eyes glowing like a purple flame flickering inside a hollowed out Jack-O-Lantern. “People like that fuck other people hard in the ass. I know ‘cause it’s happened to me.”

“Really....” Treize mused, stroking his chin thoughtfully. He stared out the window in silence for a couple of seconds and then walked over towards where Duo was still standing defiantly. He stooped and picked Great Expectations off the floor and sat down in the chair that Wufei had vacated earlier, looking up at Duo’s blazing eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t let them do that then. People will only bother you as much as you’ll allow them to.”

“Hey, I don’t need you to be my friggin’ shrink, Mr. Kushrenada,” Duo said coldly. The fact that he was addressing Treize with such formalities sealed the fact that he was outright bitter and angry, far too wrapped up with such emotions to try and conceal them behind the traditional Maxwell grin. “If I wanted to hear that kind of stupid analyst psychobabble, then I’d go see a doctor, not some two-bit art teacher.”

“Duo, Duo, please, you’re getting worked up over nothing!” Treize shook the book at Duo, trying hard to keep himself as calm as possible. He had not meant to get Duo so upset. Actually, he had not known that Duo would react to his questions like this; he never had before, and from the conversations the two had previously engaged in, Treize would have been willing to bet anything that Duo actually enjoyed speaking to him about matters like this. He supposed that guesses like that tended to be wrong when it came to complex minds like that of Duo Maxwell. After all, he thought to himself, furrowing his oddly forked eyebrows over his elegant Roman nose, I thought I had Heero Yuy pegged after a couple conversations, and look how wrong I turned out to be about him....

”I’m sorry,” came a strangled whisper that drew Treize gently out of his quiet thoughts. The art teacher looked up at Duo, who had now sat down in one of the other chairs, his hands folded restlessly in his lap as he stared down at them, booted feet clunking noisily on the creaky floorboards. “I didn’t mean to get angry at you. I’m not mad at you. I... I just get really defensive sometimes. I don’t like being vulnerable, that’s all.”

“Ahh,” Treize hummed, tucking the hand he was holding Duo’s book in beneath his chin. “No one likes feeling that way. I don’t, you don’t, Trowa doesn’t, Heero doesn’t and neither does Wufei. I’m sure your blond friend, the Winner kid, doesn’t either....”

“Please don’t call him ‘the Winner kid’,” Duo said softly, still having trouble meeting Treize’s eyes directly, though he would glance up at him every once in a while when he thought the lacrosse coach was not paying attention. “He’s not a Winner anymore, for the time being at least. Just call him Quatre, or Q, or whatever... Just... just not some kid....”

“He’s a good friend, isn’t he?” Treize assessed wisely. Duo nodded meekly in response. Treize was a little surprised at how demure Duo had suddenly become. What had happened to that wild fire that had just been kindling behind his eyes moments before? It had been put out in a flash of sparks and tinder without Treize even noticing that it had gone away. “Well, Trowa is a good friend of mine, so to speak. I would not allow a good friend of yours to spend a lot of time with someone who I didn’t think was a good person.”

“Yeah, says you,” Duo argued feebly. “You’re... you’re the lacrosse coach. Of course you’re going to like all the guys on the team.”

“Ha, you think so?” Treize guffawed loudly, slapping his knee with the book. A dark smile crossed his features as he dropped his voice into a harsh whisper and said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but there are plenty of boys on the lacrosse team I would love to see on the injured list--permanently. I happen to think Trowa is a fine lad. Good musician too, I might add.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Duo hummed quietly. “I guess if you say so....” He agreed at last. If so many people were so sure that Trowa was an okay guy, then he supposed that maybe Quatre had latched onto something. He was the one with the empathetic Sense, after all. “I’m just worried that Trowa wouldn’t like Q if he found out... something he didn’t... consider normal....” He avoided mentioning directly about Quatre’s mutation; one couldn’t be too careful.

“How would you know?” Treize shrugged, an ambiguous smile on his face. Duo was not quite sure how to read that expression. It almost seemed like Treize knew exactly what he was talking about, or like he was at least in on something that Duo was missing entirely. Any further thoughts on that were forgotten as Treize artfully changed the topic. He tossed Great Expectations back to Duo, where it landed with a loud smack on the floor beside the braided boy’s chair. “You know, Dickens wrote two endings for that book. It’s up to the reader to pick whichever one suits him best,” Treize was saying amiably as he stood up again and returned to the filing cabinet to finish up. “What do you think of Estella?”

“She’s a right bitch,” Duo answered, bending over to pick up the book, dusting at some nonexistent smudge on the cover to distract himself.

“She’s the bitch? Are you sure?” Treize asked. “Or is it Miss Havisham?”

“I dunno. They’re both kinda upper-crust, manipulative snots,” Duo answered, flipping the book over and applying the same ministrations to the back of the hard bound text. “Some nerve, dragging poor Pip into their house just to make fun of him ‘cause he’s poor and a boy.” Duo shook his head disdainfully at the book, as if the characters would be able to reciprocate his dislike for them.

“Ever stop to think that maybe Estella is the way she is because of the way Havisham raised her?” Treize asked, his tone suggesting that what he was trying to get at had absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens at all. “That she was trained and beat into such a callous way because Havisham never loved her? You know, later in the book, the old cootie windbag actually feels bad about it when Estella tells her she doesn’t know how to love her because she never learned how. So maybe it’s not her fault that she’s so mean to Pip. Could be just because of the way she was raised, her life and her experiences. Surely you’ve got experiences that helped make you, well, you!”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?” Duo shrugged, rather intrigued by this little dip into Treize’s two-cent stash. “Where’d this all come from?”

“Used to teach English Lit. before I started teaching here,” Treize answered. Creak, flap, bang, he whisked another drawing away into its proper drawer. Creak, flap, bang; in went another before he went on. “That book is my favourite by Dickens,” he said, making a hand motion in the general direction of Duo and the novel. “I don’t want to ruin too much of it for you if you’ve only just started it though.” He paused and shuddered, “God knows I was ready to shoot my English teacher when I was in high school. Now that lady was a bitch! She ruined the whole goddamned story in the first chapter, while she was reading it to us! We were in the damn tenth grade too! Who reads out loud to tenth graders?”

“Wow, don’t we feel a little bitter,” Duo deadpanned, his usual, spry wit starting to kick alive within him again.

“Do we ever! I didn’t actually read the book myself until I was teaching it in school!” Creak, flap, SLAM, creak, flap, SLAM. Treize whirled around as the last of the drawings went flying into the metal drawer, “Don’t ever just comply with something that a teacher says solely out of respect for the fact that the person is your teacher!”

“Profound,” Duo answered, his voice very dry and sarcastic, but good-natured, unlike the cynicism he often directed towards Heero. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Buddha,” Treize stated matter-of-factly. “I know someone who admires a lot of those sayings. For good reason too! I think they’re very wise.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Duo admitted. “I’ve never really heard that many.”

“Well, we can fix that by the end of the season, I’m sure,” Treize said jovially, laughing a little to accentuate the statement. “Among other things, of course,” he chuckled. “Who knows? Maybe you and Heero Yuy will be best friends by the time school’s out.”

“Uh huh,” Duo made a noise lost somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Yeah. Right. Like that would happen.”

“Hmm, you never know with some things. Bet you never thought your best friend and Trowa would turn out to be as close as they are,” Treize shrugged, walking over to his desk, checking the watch strapped around his left wrist as he moved. “Jesus crap! Would you look at the time! We have to get down to pack up for the game!” Treize scooped up a black briefcase that had been sitting, hidden, on the far side of his drafting table. He started for the door, lingering there long enough to say to Duo: “Oh, and on your way down, give it some thought to what I said about Estella. Maybe it’ll help you pick out how you want the book to end. The choice is there, after all.” He laughed mysteriously as he started off, his voice still echoing into the classroom, “it just depends on what your great expectations are....”

“What is he on about?” Duo whispered, looking down at the novel lying on top of his thighs, looking all innocent and harmless, yet still laughing at him with that same mocking, knowing tone that Treize just had been. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was trying to compare her to....” he trailed off, still refusing to even look down that road, his eyes moving up to stare blankly out the window, the afternoon sun’s silvery white rays smearing themselves across the translucent glass. The light pained his vision, soon returning it back down to the book’s plain brown cover as he sat, contemplating what Treize was alluding to. “Estella.... Estella.... Who is Estella...?”

He was afraid to even think about the answer; he knew damn well who should be called Estella.

(x) X (x)

a/n: At last, the long anticipated day! For all of you who didn’t know, Febuary 20, 1967 is the day that Kurt Cobain, eternal keeper of the grunge flame and leading man of Nirvana, was born. He would have been 37 this year, if he hadn’t committed suicide (...murdered... <.<) in 1994. Baked him a cake today! Well, so now you see why I waited for today. How could I name this story Smells Like Teen Spirit and not honour this day! Wai! ^___^;;;

And, on another note, the chapter title is a Smashing Pumpkins song! Yay!

Aaaand, one more thing: Treize’s 10th grade teacher... was my 10th grade teacher, word for word. That woman was a psycho. Really, who teaches like that!?

Thank you for all the reviews and e-mails I’ve been getting about this story. You have no idea how much it means to me to hear thoughts about what you’ve been reading. In case you haven’t visited my website yet (grrr!), there’s information on a contest I’ve decided to host. Go check it out and then write, write! The winner gets artwork depicting a scene from their story and one of those funky “Yay, I won!” banners.