Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 3
Hello, I Love You

(x) X (x)

“So how was practice yesterday?” Quatre asked Duo, reaching for a carton of milk as they proceeded through the lunch line the next day. “Hot or not?”

“Definitely not,” Duo groaned bitterly as he chose three cans of different kinds of soda from the army of beverages sitting on the bar. “It was probably the most boring and painful experience of my life and I would sooner commit ritual suicide instead of going back.”

“That bad, eh?” Quatre assessed, his eyes darting back and forth between the choices for lunch that day: lasagna or egg rolls and fried rice. Finally settling on a cheese-covered piece of lasagna that was drenched in meaty sauce, he moved down the line, picking up his conversation with Duo. “What made it so bad?”

Not even pausing to choose between the two entrees, instead piling a healthy portion of each onto his plate, Duo said nothing in response as he served himself, though his lips were moving subtly enough to draw out a low grouse of muttered curses. Then he picked up his tray, moodily snatched a piece of chocolate cake off the cart at the end of the buffet and pushed his way out of the line, making his way for their usual table on the other side of the crowded cafeteria.

Quatre warily followed him, skipping right over the cake in his hurry to sit down with Duo and sap him for information. If there was one thing Quatre was good at, it was getting what he wanted to know out of a person through a series of cute expressions and carefully placed words. “Alright, spill,” Quatre said in a kindly commanding tone as he set his tray down on the table and slid into the seat opposite of Duo. “How could your first day be so unbelievably bad when you didn’t even have to do anything?”

Duo made it look like he was too absorbed in shoving food down his throat to pay any attention to Quatre’s question, though his violet eyes did flick upwards to glance at Quatre for a moment before returning to his main focus of eating.

“No wonder you always say that line about never lying because you’re no good at it,” Quatre said glibly, artfully separating a bite off of the rest of his lasagna with a slicing motion of his fork. “And when you clam up like that, I know you’ve got something chipping away at that crazy little machine you like to call your brain. Now tell me what’s eating you.”

“Actually, Q,” he said, taking a pause to take a swig from his soda pop, pointing to the remains of his lunch with the end of his knife, “I’m the one eating this.”

“Bad joke, bad time,” Quatre said, dropping his fork and crossing his arms, a dry look hardening his childish features somewhat. “If you don’t tell me why you’re all irritable today, I’ll tickle it out of you right here in the middle of the cafeteria.”

“You’re so damn nosy, Quat,” Duo replied, brushing of the threat as he leaned on one elbow and chugged another long slurp of cola. “Always were the little gossip queen.”

“Don’t think I won’t do it, because I will.” Quatre raised one hand menacingly, waggling his fingers at Duo as if to back up his intimidation. “It sure will be great when you’re on the floor at my mercy and everyone in the whole damn school is watching and laughing at you all because you couldn’t take a little tickling. Then when I get it out of you, everyone will hear it and it’ll be the talk of the town by this afternoon.” Quatre’s voice got almost sadistic as he raised his other hand and exercised in a similar fashion to the other, “And that will be the end of the great Duo Maxwell.”

Though the threat was frighteningly plausible, Duo was only half listening to what Quatre was saying, his eyes more focused on the noisy hubbub circulating around them. His eyes were darting around people, eventually targeting the location of a small table for two where a pair of boys, one with long shaggy cinnamon bangs swept over one eye and the other with unruly short dark hair were sitting, hunched across their table engaged in quiet conversation.

The sound of another tray hitting their table and the squeal of a chair being dragged across the floor jarred Duo out of his stupor. He snapped up and jerked his head around to see their friend, Dorothy Catalonia, take the spot between the two of them at the head of the table. Dorothy was Quatre’s next door neighbour, the two of them playmates since childhood and quite the interesting combination. While Quatre was tactful and extremely sensitive to the feelings of others, Dorothy was brash, a rather in-your-face sort of person and was never one to mince words. Despite her gregarious—and sometimes outright rude—personality, she was a good person at heart and never failed to be a lively addition to the lives of both Quatre and Duo.

As with Quatre and Duo, their friendship had spawned from their differences from a good portion of mankind. Dorothy herself was a shape shifter, a talent that Duo found just as useful for himself to exploit as for Dorothy. On first glance, Dorothy looked like another human, just like Duo and the others. However, unlike her friends, Dorothy’s mutated genes could be physically noticed if one knew what to look for. She found that unless she brought attention to it though, no one every really noticed her glassy reflective cat-like green eyes or the somewhat unnatural vampiric colouring she had, alabaster white skin and long shining white-gold hair. Her eyebrows were forked oddly at the ends, a common but subtle trait among all shape-shifting mutants, though hers were split to such an extreme that it was almost harder not to notice them. All three of them each had experienced rather nasty confrontations with people who didn’t find their unique skills all that ‘cool’.

“What’s got Maxwell’s head in the clouds?” she asked, popping her can of root beer with a fizzing hiss as she spoke.

“I am not in the clouds, thanks,” Duo snapped at Dorothy, who was watching him smugly as she threw back her can of soda and gulped it down. “I’m stuck here in the miserable hell commonly called reality.”

“He’s in the clouds,” Dorothy said to Quatre doggedly, setting her soda down. Quatre nodded in agreement, resuming his own meal. Dorothy smirked and flipped her extremely long golden blonde hair over her shoulder. “Whose been starring in your wet dreams lately, Duo baby?” she asked cheekily as she pilfered an egg roll off of Duo’s plate.

Duo did not even notice the missing piece of food as he would have if Dorothy’s question had not made him flush and fume so badly. “Why that is none of your business, Dorothy,” he barked, practically climbing over the table to get at her throat. Just because he thought that stupid bastard with the frigid stare had been the most beautiful creature to ever walk the face of the planet did not mean that he fantasized about him. Staring in unabashed lust was one thing; dreaming was another entirely, reserved only for someone special.

“He’s got a new crush, I can tell,” Dorothy told Quatre, who was listening with wide intrigued eyes, his chin cupped in his hands like he was listening to an extremely enthralling story. Dorothy glanced over at Duo, who had taken to staring back at the lunchroom, his eyes seeming to flit aimlessly across the people there. But Dorothy was no fool and her next words proved it. “That one, right there,” she whispered in a low tone, aiming her sauce-drenched fork somewhere behind Quatre, causing the aquamarine-eyed boy to swivel around to look at what she had seen.

Quatre followed the line of Dorothy’s fork to a rectangular table for two, tucked away in the far corner of the room. “That one?” Quatre asked in an equally hushed tone, pointing at the boy whose face he could see. He peeked over at Duo to see if he had noticed their whispered conference about him right there in front of his face. To Dorothy’s credit, Quatre noted that Duo’s eyes also seemed to be preoccupied with that little corner table on the other side of the world.

“No, no, the other,” Dorothy answered, shaking her fork a little to the left as if to guide Quatre’s stare. “The short one with the messy dark hair, sitting with his back to us.”

“Are you sure?” Quatre asked, his gaze for some reason wanting to trail back to the other boy. “They’re sitting so close, it could be either one he’s gawking at….” At this, as if on command, both Dorothy and Quatre snapped their heads in Duo’s direction. Quatre could see flashes of the dark haired boy littering Duo’s brain waves. He caught Dorothy’s eyes, their eyes narrowing and stealing back from Duo to meet in a secret look. “…Right, so it’s the dark haired one. So what?”

Suddenly, Duo flew out of his dazed state, slapped both hands on the table and stuck his nose right in the middle of Dorothy and Quatre. “You two nutcases wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?” He sent a cute little pout and a hardly daunting angry glare at each of them as he added sarcastically, as if to affirm his accusation. “Because, why would two friends sit and gossip about another when he’s sitting right in front of them? Why, huh?” He got into Quatre’s face, his forehead practically touching the other boy’s, “Mr. I’m-So-Damn-Cute wouldn’t know anything about that, would he? He wouldn’t go snooping in their friend’s private thoughts now, would he? Huh?”

“Duo….” Quatre sighed, using his forefinger to push Duo’s nose back a couple of inches.

“WOULD he?” Duo demanded again, his voice climbing over the lunchroom din. Noticing the sudden silence that swept the entire cafeteria for a couple seconds, Duo chuckled nervously and sunk back down in his seat, not failing to notice that Heero had twisted completely around in his seat to look. There was a brief moment where their gazes locked and, realizing this, both sent horrible glares at each other from their respective corners of the room.

“You got caught again,” Quatre murmured sarcastically. “I think you’re losing your touch, Duo.”

“Shut up, Q!” Duo snarled defensively, slinking so low in his chair that his eyes were only just peering over the tabletop, his gangly legs tangled around the feet of Quatre’s chair opposite him. “A guy’s got the right to enjoy the scenery! Just because he’s got that wild sexy look about him does not mean that I like him or anything. I’ll have you know that that Heero Yuy is the most horrible person I have ever had the displeasure of meeting, thank you very much!”

“And there you have it,” Quatre muttered sarcastically to Dorothy in regards to why Duo was so cranky, to which Dorothy nodded in morbid agreement. He glanced at Duo, who was still sulking, as he went on. “Though I don’t quite see what’s so bad about him. He seems like just another guy.”

“No, he’s not just another guy,” Duo complained, throwing his arms over his head irately.

“Oh, did you hear that, Quatre darling?” Dorothy grinned viciously. “He’s special.”

“He is not,” Duo insisted. “Ha, you think I’m in a bad mood? That guy has a serious case of 24/7 male PMS. Just more proof that beauty is only skin deep.”

“Don’t you think you’re prejudging a little quick?” Quatre asked seriously, resting his plush cheek on one fisted hand. “Maybe he’s very nice if you get to know him.” He nodded his head in Heero’s direction. “That boy he’s sitting with seems to be enjoying his company well enough.”

“You could smack that other kid and he wouldn’t notice,” Duo answered snidely. “Doesn’t say a word.”

“What’s your point?” Quatre asked flatly.

“My point is that I was right about them all being the same. People are bad enough; jocks are even worse, the most ignorant and boring among the ignorant and boring,” Duo spat degradingly. He had always found his mutant gift something that made him even more unique, a trait that he always strove for. Though he did know a fair share of regular people who were involved with the arts that were perfectly interesting, he found himself still a butterfly among moths. “The quiet one, Barton, will sit there and watch while Hurricane Yuy comes along and messes the shit out of everyone around him! All they can do is sit there and go on and on about how idiots like them run the school and the world around it. It’s people like them who don’t like people like us. Makes me sick.”

“Alright Duo, let’s have it,” Quatre sighed and buried his forehead in his one hand, shaking it back and forth hopelessly. “What horrible indiscretion did he perform against you?”

“He ran into me and then had the nerve to start pissing and moaning about it like it was my fault,” Duo accused darkly, one hand resting flat against his chest in reference to himself, the other quivering in Heero’s direction.

“Oh, I think I heard someone talking about this during second period,” Dorothy interjected with an unhealthy giggle. She narrowed her eyes at Duo, her odd forked eyebrows arched as she did so, “If I remember the story right, I believe you threw a water bottle at him, Mr. Maxwell.”

“You did not,” Quatre gaped, drawing a flabbergasted hand over his mouth. He stared at Duo’s defiant and cynical face. “You did!”

“I did, and I’d do it again too,” Duo defended himself angrily. “I said I hated him and he said he hated me….”

“Yeah, and then he dumped another bottle of water on his head,” Dorothy cut in, completely ignoring the dastardly glare Duo sent her way as she spoke in Quatre’s direction. Much as either Dorothy or Duo would have hated to admit it, they actually found getting under each other’s skin to be a highly amusing form of entertainment. Despite the fact it seemed like they were always on the verge of killing each other, they were actually pretty good friends.

“He pulled my hair!”

“After you poured water onto his head!”

“Please guys!” Quatre held up both his hands to put a halt to their arguing. Quite frankly, it was giving him a violent headache and if he had to hear anymore of Duo’s kavetching, he would tear every golden strand of hair out of his head. “Okay, okay, so that’s why Duo hated tryouts yesterday, end of story,” he said diplomatically. “Dorothy,” he addressed the blonde girl on his left, “if Duo says he doesn’t like this Heero kid, then that’s it; leave it alone. Duo,” he turned to his longhaired friend, “first impressions don’t always reveal a person’s character, so I won’t have you constantly complaining about someone you’ve only met once. Just because you fought with him the first day you met doesn’t mean you might not end up being friends. It’s not like he even knows about your mutation.”

“Whatever, Q,” Dorothy and Duo blandly chorused together, before taking a pause to realize this and then shooting horrible stares at each other for daring to speak over top of each other like that.

“You guys are impossible,” Quatre moaned forlornly into his hands. “Remind me of one good reason why I put up with you two? Why?”

“Because you love us,” Duo made a sugary face at Quatre, smothering his lips cutely into his hands as he shook his head at the blonde boy. “Kiss, kiss, Q.”
They spent the rest of the lunch in relative silence compared to the relentless arguing that had taken place at the beginning of the period. Dorothy connived, Duo brooded and Quatre shivered as the combination of his two friends’ thoughts plagued his sixth sense. As he cleaned up his tray and prepared to go jam in a little extra music practice before the bell rang, he hoped that things would ease up as time with Duo as the year went on. The blonde Arabian was pretty sure he would not be able to take another day of Dorothy and Duo at their worst.

(x) X (x)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Trowa and Heero were enjoying (more or less) a fairly quiet lunch. Heero was pretty much focused on eating his simple bag lunch of sticky white rice and stir-fried vegetables, his lacquered chopsticks moving faster than his friend thought physically possible. Trowa, on the other hand, was torn between nibbling on his own food and spying over Heero’s shoulder, as if on the lookout.

“Jeez, you’re like a garbage disposal,” Trowa commented at last, breaking their silence. “Why the rush?”

Heero’s intense blue stare nipped upwards briefly to glance at Trowa, his cobalt eyes seeming to flicker a brighter shade before darkening to their usual glassy hue. “Why do you think?” he said in his quiet growl. To anyone else, his tone might have sounded dangerous, but Trowa and Heero had known each other for quite some time and the cinnamon haired boy had grown used to Heero’s sometimes gruff ways of speaking.

“Oh,” Trowa said, taking the hint. He took a quick glance around the room again, his eyes wary like a watchdog or a bodyguard. “Forget it. She’s not here.”

“You never know,” Heero muttered darkly, swallowing the last bit of his lunch and rinsing it down with a swig from his nearby bottle of water. “She has ways of sneaking up on you like a bad dream.”

They were talking about the bane of Heero’s existence, a snooty girl on the cheerleading squad who had been just short of stalking Heero since sophomore year. Relena Peacecraft was considered by many the most popular girl in school, and with that title came certain (as she saw it) ‘rights’, one of them being the right to be the girlfriend of one of the school’s star athletes. Unfortunately, the one she had her target set on happened to be the practically unattainable Heero Yuy. From Trowa’s third party standpoint on the whole matter, it seemed to him that the girl had chosen Heero because one, he was extremely (extremely) handsome and two, he’d never been seen with a date in public. In other words, he was like wild game, and the better the chase, the better the glory when finally hunted down. To say the least, it disturbed Trowa almost as much as it did Heero, probably since because they spent so much time together, whenever Relena decided to go ‘Heero-hunting’, it inadvertently affected Trowa as well. It was not helpful either that Relena was such good friends with his sister….

Trowa looked up again, just in case the queen bee and her hive had buzzed into the room sometime in the past five minutes he had spent thinking to himself. His keen eyes roved the room for what seemed the hundredth time that hour in search of trouble, the only noteworthy observation being a blonde girl from his history class pointing at their table with her fork. Her male friend was bent around in his chair and staring right at them. “Five o’clock,” Trowa commented idly, nodding over Heero’s shoulder in their direction. “You’re being spied on.”

“Hn,” Heero grunted blandly, finding his bottle of water a little more interesting than the world around them.

Trowa sighed; they were caught up in one of their friendly quiets again. He was a little depressed that Heero was not in the mood for talking. While Heero appeared to be just an angry person, Trowa knew that there was a very interesting young man buried in there, one that liked books and intellectual conversation. And while he gave the appearance of not seeming to be any more than a rather surly individual, one who had spent as much time with Heero as Trowa had would know that there was a very vulnerable and lonely person hidden away inside that tough shell. It was all a matter of finding the right person for him to connect with, and then he would unfold. It just was not that easy all the time. Lord knew that Trowa had spent many years in silence with Heero before they ever were comfortable enough with each other to even consider talking to one another. Trowa wondered if there was someone who would be able to open Heero up like a key to a hidden box that held more treasures than anyone could ever dream.

“WOULD he?” a slightly familiar voice shouted from the other side of the cafeteria, bringing the whole room to a brief silence. Heero whirled around in his seat to see who had shouted, the pained expression on his face giving away that he had spotted something unpleasant. Trowa bent around Heero’s body to take a look at that table he had noticed earlier, a smug grin forming on his lips as he watched the lacrosse team’s new manager skulk low in his chair with embarrassment.

The lunchroom was soon roiling along at its usual pace again, the outburst forgotten. Trowa leaned back in his chair comfortably as Heero turned back around, his face unreadable as he stared down at his lunch, slowly beginning to pack it back into the brown paper bag he carried it in. “New lax manager’s a trip,” Trowa commented conversationally. “What was his name…?”

“Duo Maxwell,” Heero interjected plainly, neatly rolling the top of the bag closed, speaking the name in a natural tone that threw Trowa for a loop for a second.

“That’s it, Duo,” Trowa said, trying to put a little more expression in his voice than he usually did in an effort to coax Heero out of hiding. Sometimes doing so was exasperating work for just a short exchange of words that barely constituted as a conversation. Though they were friends, Trowa knew he did not have that special ‘gift’ it took to win Heero easily. He went on. “What do you think of him?”

“Hn,” Heero grunted in response.

Trowa was about to open his mouth to say something else, when a girlish squeal jolted him out of conversational mode. “Red alert,” he mouthed to Heero, who was already preparing to get up and go. It never failed to amaze Trowa how good Heero’s timing was. Somehow the stoic Japanese boy was able to keep an eye on everything going on around him without batting an eyelash.

“I’ll see you after school,” Heero said plainly as he stood, glancing darkly at the towheaded girl in pink as she flounced her way through the cafeteria towards their little table, flanked by her cohort, Catherine Barton and their posse of drones.

Trowa knew that death stare well; he pitied anyone on the wrong end of it. “Later,” he said in response, feeling a little guilty that he was abandoning Heero like this to fend off his one-woman fanclub all by himself. But Trowa was pretty sure that if he had to deal with another bout of that girl’s shameless flirting, he’d throw himself in front of a speeding bus, so he hightailed it out of there as fast as his long legs could carry him.

“I feel so bad for that guy,” Trowa mused in regards to his poor friend, now walking down one of the school’s many hallways on his own. “If I was followed around by that Peacecraft girl, I think I would be a moody son of a bitch too.” Though the thought made Trowa chuckle a little, his heart twisted a bit, knowing full well that the reason Heero had turned out the way he was had to do with the rather upsetting and traumatizing childhood he had endured as opposed to anything occurring in his present-day life. That was part of the reason that Trowa hoped that something happened to Heero to make the lonesome boy feel some reason to be alive.

Turning a corner, he heard the strains of a light jazzy piano filling his ears. He smiled at the sound and went on walking, though as he traveled further down the hall, closer to the source of the classy music, he found that his feet were slowing down, subsequently coming to a halt outside a slightly ajar door at the end of the corridor. Standing there, he could tell that it was this room that the music was coming from and decided to investigate.

Pushing the door open a bit further, he peered in to find himself looking into one of the little closet-space band rooms that littered the school. At the piano on the far side of the room, his back to the door was a small blonde boy eloquently playing the suave, catchy theme from the old animated Pink Panther sketches. It brought a smile to Trowa’s lips and for a moment, he forgot about worrying for Heero and his drastically worsening reclusive tendencies.

Unconsciously snapping his fingers to the beat, Trowa slid soundlessly into the room, finding a comfortable seat on a black stool hidden behind a small drum kit. After a few minutes of listening to the blonde play through the sequence, Trowa’s eyes eventually discovered a pair of drumsticks lying beside his stool. He stooped to pick them up, holding them loosely in his fingers as his brief lessons in percussion had taught him, waiting for the blonde to recycle through his piece before joining in on the drum kit.

The boy seemed startled when Trowa made the first series of beats on the drums, not realizing that he had been gifted with unexpected company as he looked almost fearfully over his shoulder to see who had sneaked in on him, his fingers still flying gracefully over the ivories. Trowa glanced up from the drum kit to look at the boy’s face as he turned. He was not sure why he found that he was pleasantly surprised to discover the boy was the male friend of that strange blonde girl who had been spying on Heero and him from Duo’s table about a half hour before.

“If you don’t mind my asking, but who’re you?” the boy queried, his voice a high alto pitch. He frowned and said quietly to himself in a voice that was not meant for Trowa’s ears, “I didn’t even feel you come in.”

“Me? I’m Trowa,” the emerald-eyed youth answered, still dutifully keeping rhythm with the blonde’s piano. “Trowa Barton.”

“Huh, Trowa,” the blonde mused, seeming to be satisfied with the answer. “Well Trowa Barton,” he went on as he turned around again, giving his full attention to his music, “you play a mean set of drums. Where’d you get so good?”

“Thank you….” Trowa said, trailing off as if to invite his newfound friend to inform him of his name.

“Quatre,” the pianist finished for him. Trowa somehow could tell from the sound of his voice that his new friend was smiling. “Quatre Raberba Winner.”

“Quatre,” Trowa nodded to himself and went on, somehow feeling at ease with the blonde musician. Much as the tall goalie loved Heero, sometimes he was a lot of work and his unpredictability sometimes left Trowa rather high-strung. This was a nice transition, he decided. Their school was pretty big, and people one did not have classes with were rarely seen. Trowa decided he was glad that he had been wandering this way, or else he might have never walked in on Quatre. “I learned to play, my brother taught me,” he explained with a warm smile at the mention of said beloved sibling. “He’s very talented in many respects—almost to a point of irritation.” A small disgruntled frown riddle Trowa’s lips as he grumbled under his breath, “Everyone I know seems to be way too talented for their own good. Makes me look bad.”

“Oh you have a brother?” Quatre inquired, abruptly stopping his piano playing to turn around and face Trowa, abruptly ripping Trowa from his low grouse of complaining. A little swallowed gasp resonated in Quatre’ throat when he realized that the boy sitting at the drum kit was they very boy who had been with Heero Yuy that day at lunch. Deciding that Duo was just full of a lot of hot air, Quatre shrugged it off, not caring what the braided boy would think of his choice in friends.

“Yeah,” Trowa nodded, folding the drumsticks in his lap and looking across at Quatre from beneath partially lowered eyelids, “a brother and a sister. What about you?”

“I have twenty-nine sisters,” Quatre said flatly, waiting to see Trowa’s reaction to the impressive number. He was not disappointed by the gaping jaw and suddenly widened eyes that manifested upon Trowa’s face. Laughing at the expression, Quatre filled in the rest of the story. “Everyone always looks at me like that when they first hear that but it’s really not as crazy as you’d think. You see, my mother had a lot of trouble with having children so most of them are lab babies. My eldest sister and I were the only two natural born children my parents ever had. There were certain… complications with our births… so my parents resorted to doing the rest of their reproducing in the lab to be safe.”

“Oh,” Trowa sighed, looking somewhere between a little intrigued and a little relieved. “And here I am thinking that my one sister, Catherine, is a pain in the ass.”
“Well, the question should be, is she?” Quatre said wisely, a small chuckle falling from his lips.

“I swear, considering she’s my twin, she couldn’t be any more different from me!” Trowa smiled too, a rare occurrence for the normally serious and soft-spoken young man. “Let’s just say she doesn’t hang out with a good crowd. Bunch of cheerleading misfits.”

Quatre’s smile doubled at that, his chuckles becoming outright laughter. Trowa demanded to know what was so funny and Quatre was more than willing to oblige. “I just never thought that…” he said, trying hard to pause long enough in his bout of laughter so he could speak coherently, “…Well, my friend has this… this thing against guys like you… but this… oh this is something that would leave that motor-mouth gaping like a fish!”

“What do you mean by that?” Trowa asked suspiciously, a touch of hurt flickering across his face at the mention of ‘guys like you’.

“He’s very… non-conformist,” Quatre said tentatively, unsure of how to make it seem as trivial as possible. Personally, he had decided that he liked Trowa, having detected a warm undulating vibration radiating off the other boy’s skin, and whether Duo had a thing about preps or not, he would not allow that to hinder his friendship with Trowa. “Much as I like the boy, he kind of scrapes all you cheerleaders and sports junkies under the same rug. A little foolhardy, sure, but sometimes I can’t help but see where he’s coming from.” As a flicker of hurt skimmed briefly across Trowa’s chiseled features, Quatre fought hard to quickly amend his words. “Not that there’s anything wrong with you. You don’t seem like…. Well, you’re not like the ones Duo complains about. I mean, he thinks you are, but I’m sure if he knew how you could play those drums he might not be so condescending….”

“Duo, eh?” Trowa asked, his fearful expression replaced with one of amusement. “Duo Maxwell, you mean?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Quatre beamed. He paused for a moment, calculating, before he said. “You must be on the lacrosse team then. Duo’s your team manager this year.”

“That’s right,” Trowa nodded with a small grin, running a hand through his long cascading cinnamon brown bangs. “Seems like quite the… loaded pistol….”

“Try cannon,” Quatre laughed heartily. “He likes to lock horns with just about everyone, even me! And I’m supposed to be his best friend!”

“Want another ‘best friend’?” Trowa said in an ambiguous tone, his eyes focused poignantly on Quatre. Now that seemed to have generated from nothing. The blonde boy could feel himself practically shivering at the intense scrutiny that was spinning around in the emerald tides of Trowa’s eyes. The moment was shattered by the ill-timed ringing of the bell marking the end of the period; the device was silently cursed by both boys.

“Well Mr. Trowa Barton, drumming expert and potential best-friend-in-training,” Quatre said, standing up and reaching around the piano to pick up his discarded backpack, “I hope to see more of you in the near future.”

“Me too,” Trowa smiled genuinely, extending his hand in formal greeting at long last. Quatre stared at the slender fingers, eyes jumping up to Trowa’s for a brief moment before darting back down to the still waiting hand. He quickly grabbed it, squeezed it tight and muttered a nervous goodbye before speeding out of the room in a fit of flustered… something. “Me too,” Trowa whispered again as he watched Quatre go.

(x) X (x)

((A/N)) - Yeah, this chappy doesn’t follow the Stones trend I’d tried to start, but that’s okay, I guess. The Doors are just as cool! Oh, and I noticed that some of you lovely reviewers keep asking me for more background on everyone. Please, please, let the author do her work! Let me tell all ye of little faith that I am at least twenty steps ahead of you (as in, twenty chapters, hehe). I’ve got a grand plan and I know exactly where it’s going, sans a few little details here and there. The point is, just enjoy it and don’t sweat stuff like that! Believe me, it’ll all come together (right now, over me! ... sorry.... *hangs head*). Argh! This is why I like to finish before I start posting! *falls to knees* Stella~a! ^^

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