You, Me, and a Cherry Popsicle
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing, nor do I own the trademarked brand Popsicle. I do not profit in any way from my writing…in fact, I think I actually lose money from my fiction.
Pairings: 2+4+2
Timeline: I consider this to be a part of the Allegro canon, though it most certainly can stand alone. And as Allegro takes place during the present, this story would fall at about summer of 1996 thereabouts…whatever year I happened to be ten in.
Summary: Just a short little piece about two best friends, Popsicles, and meaningful discussions on things that ten-year-old boys think about. From Duo's point of view. Parental Guidance suggested.
Author's Notes: While I can't picture them as a couple, I really like seeing Duo and Quatre together. I just think they're the perfect example of best friends. Really, just friends. Nothing else. I'm not kidding; I get squicked when Quatre's paired up with anyone other than Trowa. Anyway, this is for Anne Olsen's Fringe Benefits archive of all things Duo and Quatre related.
[Special thanks go to Christa for standing in line through half of the Anime Boston Con to get me the autographs of all five pilots; I'm still all warm and squiggly inside!]
Quatre and I have been best friends since we were three, no lie. My mom used to work for his dad at Winner Enterprises, and the two of us would spend most of our days in the company daycare. I can still remember the first time we met. We'd been left in the presence of the daycare woman…Janet or Jamie or Jordan, something like that…just us and about a half dozen other kids. He was sitting by himself in one corner of the room, playing with a Bert doll. You know, Bert from Sesame Street, yellow Muppet with a unibrow. Well, it just so happened that I toddled on over with a slightly soggy (I'd been chewing on it) Ernie, Bert's roommate and best buddy. All I had to do was sit down next to Quatre, hold out good old Ernie, do that creepy laugh he does (you know, that hiss through the teeth laugh) and ask him if he'd seen a rubber ducky (though I think I pronounced it "wub-ah ducky") and that was that.
So we've been stuck together like glue since then. Our parents arranged play dates for the two of us, and then shuttle one of us to the other's house. We don't live that far from each other, he lives on the Halifax side of Plympton; I live on the Plympton side of Halifax. So by the time we were ten, we were old enough to bike to one another's houses and not go home until either somebody's parent called and told us to come home for dinner, or until the very first firefly started winking in the summer dark. Yeah, so this was the summer where we were both ten, Quatre and me, and it was one of the hottest summers I can remember.
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We were sitting out in Quatre's backyard…he's got a huge backyard, I think it used to be a horse farm before his family moved in, and since they don't have horses it's just a big space…the two of us sitting on this weathered old wooden fence that surrounds the perimeter of the Winners' property. The grass was long and not yet cut, yellowed stalks that reached to our waists and waved in the wind. Every time we sang that part of "America the Beautiful…" you know, that part that goes, "for amber waves of grain," I'd think of Quatre's backyard.
Like I said, we were sitting on this grayish old fence in his backyard, I've got on a pair of denim overalls with one strap undone and hanging down my back, along with my short little beginning of a braid, and this obnoxious bright orange and white striped t-shirt underneath it, no shoes and no socks. Quatre just had on a pair of denim shorts and this funny colored shirt…it was kind of purply pink, like a really girly color…I'm pretty sure it was a hand-me-down of his sisters' that he put on just because it was a clean shirt and Quatre always looked pretty good in funny purply pink colors.
"Do guys still think girls have cooties at your school?" he asked me as I pulled a piece of straw-dry grass up and stuck the end in my mouth, looking like Hick Boy.
I shrugged. "Dunno. I still think girls have cooties, they'll still have cooties even when we're in the high school, and that's a long way away, y'know?"
Quatre nodded, wrinkling his nose. He was starting to get freckly. "I think they do too."
Girls were one of those ambiguous subjects. Sometimes you'd hear stories that so-and-so kissed what's-her-name out on the playground, and you'd get mixed reactions. Some guys would scrunch up their faces and say, "ewww, gross!" while others would ask, "really?" and want to hear more about it. Me, I thought girls were stupid, and continued to think so until they started turning into teenage girls and got awful pretty.
Quatre's older sisters were mostly all teenage girls, and they were pretty. I say this because while we were having our serious discussion on cooties and the best method to get a cooties shot, Quatre's oldest sister Madiha came out into the yard with Popsicles in her hand for both of us…actually, there were three. She knew Quatre only liked the orange ones, but she couldn't remember if I liked grape or cherry. Sometimes I don't even know which one I like better. I took the cherry one, mostly because it was kind of close to dinner and my mom would have gotten pretty pissed off if I came home with a purple mouth.
"Your sister's wicked cool," I informed him, taking a big slurp out of my Popsicle.
Quatre shook his head, his lips already starting to turn orange. "Nah, she's mean. She picks on me all the time, and then she gets my sisters to pick on me too."
I never had to experience such agony. I was an only child, thank God.
"Who do you think's cooler, Batman or Superman?" I asked, swinging my bare feet as we continued slurping and drooling down the lengths of those Popsicles. Jeez, now that I think about it, that was probably the gayest thing we'd ever done, in the most literal sense of the term.
"Batman," Quatre answered thoughtfully. "Superman's stupid."
I had to concur. "Yeah. He's got too many superpowers. I mean, Batman has to think about stuff, like how he's gonna stop the Penguin and stuff, Superman he just goes 'bam! I'm so cool with all my superpowers' and he's done."
"Besides, Batman's got the Batmobile, and that's way better than just flying around."
I've always been fond of this memory. To think how simple our lives were back then, no cares in the world except for keeping away from cooties and not stepping in dog crap walking back to Quatre's house…the neighbor's dog always ran into his yard and crapped in the lawn and somehow or other one of us usually ended up stepping in it. Neither of us had any idea what an SAT was, no clue that there was actually a test involved in getting your driver's license, and we certainly had no idea that liking another guy was considered a bad thing. It's a shame, y'know, that nobody tells you these kinds of things. They just let you go about your merry way, playing superheroes in dishtowel capes, not letting you in on the really important stuff until it's almost too late.
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"Oh no!" Quatre cried, staring down at the ground. I'd been watching the grasshoppers jump around in the dead lawn and eating my Popsicle, not paying too much attention to Quatre for a while. We were cool like that, sometimes we could just sit there and watch grasshoppers and never say a word to each other for the incredible span of five whole minutes and neither of us would really care. But when Quatre's horrified wail leaked out, I immediately snapped my attention on him, and the empty, dripping stick clenched in his hand.
"My Popsicle melted off the stick and dropped," he whimpered miserably. Damn, and the last time I'd seen that orange ice water, he still had at least half of it on there. He looked like he was going to cry. Then again, Quatre always looked like he was gonna cry, those big blue eyes of his could well up with tears faster than you could go through the list of powers each one of the Planeteers had. Go, Planet! And I, of course, felt bad. Not because Quatre's Popsicle dropped, but because he was my best friend and best friends are supposed to feel bad when Popsicles hit the ground. So I did what any good and self-respecting best friend would do: take one last big huge slurp and hand the rest of one drippy cherry Popsicle covered in my spit to my very best friend.
"Here, you can have the rest of mine, I don't want it anymore," I told him.
"You sure?"
I almost said, "no, gimme it back," but that wouldn't have been cool. And I was all about being the coolest guy around. And I didn't want Quatre to feel bad, seeing him get upset made my stomach feel all funny inside. So I told him that yeah, I was sure, and he finished off the rest of the thing. And here I thought he only liked the orange ones. Huh, go figure.
"You know what, Duo?" he asked after chucking both sticks as far as he could throw them…which wasn't very far, Quatre throws like a girl.
"What's that, Quatre?"
"If girls have cooties, and guys gotta stay away from girls to not get cooties, then how come guys always end up getting married to girls? Wouldn't they get cooties? And if they do get cooties when the get married, then how come guys don't just marry other guys? That way, they don't get any cooties, and you don't have to worry about forgetting to get a cooties shot or waking up one morning and finding out your wife gave you cooties."
I'm pretty sure this was the first time either of us had ever thought about homosexuality, and for ten-year-olds who only knew that when you grew up, you married a pretty girl with cooties and had babies with her (though I still don't think we were all that sure where babies came from), this was pretty insightful.
"I don't know, Quatre. Makes sense to me. And then maybe girls should get married to other girls so they can keep their cooties to themselves, huh?"
Quatre frowned, then looked up at me. "Hey Duo? Would you ever marry me?"
"No way, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard!" I retorted. Quatre looked crushed for a moment. "If I marry you, then who would you get to be your best man? Far as I know, I'm the only guy you know that's cool enough to be the best man." And I emphasized 'the best man' as if it were the most prestigious thing you could be, like being named the Pope or something.
"Oh, yeah, good point."
We sat there a couple more minutes, watching the sun start to go down. Quatre was entertaining some goofy thought in his head, probably still fixated on the idea that if a guy married another guy, there was no way in hell he could catch cooties.
"You know, your lips are all red," I pointed out. "And you got Popsicle on your shirt."
"You do too, and your hands are all sticky," he shot back. And then he gave me a hard shove in the forearm, jumping off of the fence and running like a mad fiend into the yard. "And tag! You're It, Duo!"
There was no way I was going to be It. "I'm gonna get you, Quatre, and when I do, you'll be so It!"
So we chased each other around the backyard until it got too dark to see. Actually, I think it was until Quatre stepped on his Popsicle stick and almost stabbed himself through the foot, but that's okay.
++
I've got a ton of other crazy memories, but that's the most important one I think. That, and the time I first met Quatre. Everything else just isn't as cool. Well, maybe not everything else. Like when we started going to junior high and we met people that one, the other, or both of us had never gone to school with before…which is how we met some of the friends we have now. Then again, there's the time that we got our asses kicked by some high school kids before we learned that being gay (or bi in my case) is sometimes a very dangerous thing. It's a give and take kind of thing, y'know? But no matter how many times I broke my arm or Quatre came home crying, or how many times we'd get scolded for some stupid idea that we thought was really cool, or how many times we'd get into fights over which of the X-Men were better, he and I would still be best friends, blood buddies through and through. All right, maybe not blood buddies, but we shared each other's spit on the same cherry Popsicle back when we were ten, so I'd say that's close enough. And there ain't nothing, nothing in the world that can take away a cherry Popsicle brotherhood, not even cooties. No lie.
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Concluding Thoughts: I really like the way this fanfic turned out. I never had a best friend that would give me their half-licked Popsicle if mine took a nosedive, but I had plenty of friends who gave me cooties shots (because boys had more cooties than girls) and who were willing to let me be the Pink Power Ranger (because when we played with the neighborhood kids I always got stuck being the yellow one and I thought Trini sucked teeth). So I raise a cherry Popsicle in salute to best friends everywhere (though I only like the orange ones).