Author's Note: Okay, this was totally meant to be a one-shot kinda deal. But then I got this idea, and, crap, there goes my nice and tidy single piece. Yeah, maybe three parts to this one? Not very many, but, whatever. I wrote this, in like, 45 minutes. It's a total brain art. I actually drew a four page comic of the same name and general plot, though not for GW. Anyway, it's one in the morning, and I've got exams, soooo, peace out. Please review nicely! I have delicate baby feelings.
Good Morning part 1
By Onions Make Me Cry
It was strange that the room was so empty.
Hollow, kind of. Weird… but not really. Not too bad. But just a little unsettling. A bit out of place, you know? All that empty space.
Duo Maxwell lay half-awake, in the far corner of his sparse apartment's bedroom, where the mattress had simply been dumped on the floor… partially sitting, half falling into a tangle of yellowing sheets like the nest of some large, urban bird, the boy hovered in a restless purgatory of thoughts and daydreams.
Maybe some furniture could settle the place… like, you know… a table, maybe? A dresser. And a lamp. Or one of those little TVs you could carry around by the handle like a little lunchbox. Yeah… maybe one of those.
The room lay in shadows, except for the few slotted strips of the very first watery trickles of morning light, as it slid in through the cracks in the dusty blinds. Below the window, the radiator rumbled, percolating like the milder offspring of an overheated washing machine and a grisly bear.
Good Morning, Duo, the radiator rumbled, and the soft, consistent splip splap splap of a leak dripping on the floor added it's voice to the apartment's morning litany. Good morning, it's time to get on with it. Man, with what? Good morning, it's time to get on with your life.
One thousand… one thousand one hundred and one? Numbers ran jumbles in Duo's head, and with bleary eyes, he glanced towards the window. One thousand one hundred and seven days before today, meteors had rained down from the sky like so many thousands of stars, on a singularly epic Christmas eve. He'd seen the end of the world, and the beginning of a new one, and all before his eighteenth birthday, (God help him that he'd managed to live so long.) Shit, he'd seen it all, been to hell in a hand basket, and had managed to shimmy out again, by the marginal fraction of the hair on his balls. But what had it all been for? And what the fuck was he supposed to be doing now? Besides kicking the shit around with Hilde, like always. Questions like those, on the grander cosmic sense, always came back to bite him in the ass. Especially in these early mornings, before he bothered to drag himself up out of bed again for another working day. Nights were filled now with an instantaneous, dreamless, all consuming sleep of the dead.
/Man. A thousand. A -thousand-… One thousand, one hundred and seven days. That's a fucking long time. Fucking huge… like, totally humongous./ The musing came easy as he felt through his mattress two floors below, as the door of the junk shop slammed shut. Hilde always got in early, in order to do the kind of boring, brain numbing stuff (like inventory) that Duo could never quite handle, now that his survival didn't depend on it. /Do I even have a calendar? What month is it? I think I remember it being August… but, the nights have been kinda cold, recently. I've gotta get a thermostat. And some more blankets… maybe I still have those blankets from those space ration packs I had a thousand of… I've gotta wash my underwear./
The radiator rattled on, in rhythm with Hilde's heavy footsteps, (she must be wearing boots today) as she clunked around the shop.
But then the stomping grew closer, and then it climbed the treacherous corkscrew of stairs, first one flight, then a second flight, and then it was at his doorway, and then it was Hilde's face, shining out through the morning shadows like a lighthouse chock full of pixie dust and sunshine. She was peeping around the corner of his door. Duo's half-drooping eyes wandered away from the window towards her rosy face, and her grin spread into something stupid.
"Good morning, Duo." Hilde was absolutely humming with pleasure as she spoke.
Duo gave the girl a slow blink, wondering what she wanted so early. "…Hi."
"I have something which might cheer you up."
Hilde's pixie smile was threatening to crack her face. (Maybe he could use her instead of a standing lamp… the way her face was glowing, he'd probably be able to run all his electricity off of her nose hair for a month.) Duo's eyebrows gave a subtle rise from his shadowy nest of sheets, and he tilted his head back a little, lulling against the wall. "And… what's that?"
"Look out your window."
That sounded suspicious. Shooting his violet-capped friend a strange look, Duo at last managed to haul himself up into a complete sit. Hilde hesitated a moment, and then, grinning stupidly again, shut herself out of Duo's room as he was pulling on a pair of boxers beneath the sheets.
The radiator dripped on as Duo put his feet to the cold roughness of the wooden floor. He sat there a moment, wiggling his toes, then stooped to grab a white t-shirt discarded from earlier up off the floor. Shirt in hand, he stood and padded towards his window, losing himself in the cotton cloth as he yanked it over his loose head of hair, while at once fumbling to yank on the chord to the window blinds.
And then, as the grayish morning light flooded the empty boxlike cubicle of the room Duo had been living in for the past month and a half, he saw precisely what Hilde had been so insistent that he see.
Heero Yuy stood silently in the yard below, cherry red duffel slung over his shoulder as he stared silently up into the window above.
For a few seconds, Duo stood frozen in time, shirt halfway pulled down his front, as he looked on in relative shock. But then, movement returned, and like so many dominos falling into position, the youth yanked his shirt into place, ripped his hair out from behind the back of his collar, and hefted the heavy wooden window as far open as he could shove it.
Moments flew by, and then hours, and then a millennia as the two young men stared unabashedly at each other, stars wheeling in space, each not quite sure how to begin any form of civilized conversation.
Oddly, it was Heero who spoke first. Breaking eye contact for a moment, he glanced down at his feet and scuffed a sneaker in the dirt, before returning to Duo again.
"Good morning." Came the unusually tentative greeting.
Duo stared, slightly slack jaw for a few more seconds, before a subtle, precious smile spread across his lips.
"Morning."
Good morning Duo. It's time to get on with it.