Author's Notes
To address a few things first, I don't intend to let this story overwhelm me like others have--this is only a teaser so far. I'm developing the plot line and half-way through the second chapter, so for those of you who want to see it play out, don't worry. At least by the end of the summer I'll have a lot less writing to finish up, and I'll probably be free to work on it. Don't worry. My Shinigami, My Hamburger was just a teaser for the longest time and I still got around to it, didn't I? Merry up. Another thing, for those of you who read that it was going to be a musical rivarly between Duo's band and the rich kids and then had a horrific image of poor Heero in a flesh-colored Britney affair, don't worry. I don't intend for the story to be so much actual musical battling, it's kind of a backdrop to fuel a rivalry. No sappy songfic shit, so don't fret, Pia Bartolini. This is another product of my hunger to speak through my poor little medium slash muse, Duo Maxwell, and luckily for him, he's not going to get shot. Run over? Perhaps. Trounced? I'm squeezing it into my schedule. Plauged with angst? Why wouldn't he be? It's much different than The .45 Colt War, which was my first batter-session with our favorite American. Basically that came from wanting to break down some Heero stereotypes, and poke fun at a few others. I like to call these my experimental fics, or just really just my fetish fics. I like guns, violence, blood and Heero, and I like Duo, so that's what goes in. A match made in Deathscythe Hell. Basically, that's how The .45 Colt War got into the womb. This one involves French, pooltables, stratocastors, tuxedos, long polished sticks, a loveably crotchety Chang Wufei, and one very imperfect Duo. It's not so dark, but there's no telling how it'll go. I indulge a few of my favorite visuals and weave it into a story. Shameless, no? Oh well. Now that I've thoroughly probed my psyche, I think I'll shut up.
[It Takes the Bravest to Become Fools.]
Billiard Brats
By Kaitsurinu
[[Teaser]]
Chapter 1 – Démettant
Okay, so I have to admit a few things. This man can dance. Alright already, you've caught me again—not only is he dancing, but he's doing it very, very fucking well and making me feel like tailored velvet against him. In this materialized, place of absolute fantasy that comes every night and may be better known simply as my dreams, there's never been something so erotically simple to entice and torment me this way. Endless black all around, a pair of classic black tuxedos between us and little precious space left. Everything is chalkboard for this beautiful mathematician to work his arithmetic sin upon. In my fantasy, he is just there awaiting my arrival, no matter how long he is forced stand in that void while I drift off from the cumbersome waking world. And there is always a waltz playing.
Funny thing, that waltz.
There are some sultry foreign words being exchanged in the air above us, but of course, do I bother to listen to lyrics at a time like this? No, this is a time for the bold and the rude. There need be no indistinct glances, no chivalrous taps on the shoulders and polite words, perhaps even an outdated, "May I have this dance?" Both of us, me and this conjured man, this monstrously unbelievable man that I couldn't have possibly thought of on my own, know exactly what we came here for and we both know the other knows. Carpe-diem-zealots would gloat green with envy if they had the chance to peer in and see the magnificent show.
Champagne thoughts spill over my rim and I'm intoxicated hopelessly with the way he grabs my hand—taking the lead like the purely beatific gentleman I've fabricated him to be. Chest to chest, the Adonis being gazing down at me from his handsome height, I attempt disarming him with a sleek grin and it goes down in flame when he presents his own smile, just below the tousled chocolate-brown hair hiding his eyes. So interesting—now my dream begins conjuring the horribly shadowy and indistinct face of this Rock Hudson, this Marlon Brando—and the decisive sonata starts.
I have no idea how long we waltz in that black world, alone but somehow swarmed with swingers and a la mode lounge singers crooning to the lovers they left on the moon. Somehow the bubbly keeps flowing into those intangible glasses and fuels the slow romance that is this imagined affair. We waltz, yes, but my feet move as if they were a mind apart from me and equally intent on romancing this man's own feet. I'm more concerned with how tightly I can wrap my arm around the small of his back without letting the chic alcohol get to me and draw him a little too close. And then, there seems to be one more seductive drink and I don't care. He's gazing down at me adoringly with that face that doesn't quite exist yet, but I can see it dreamily, just imagining.
It's like designer Armani wrapped in the suave styling of some upstart New York fashion pioneer—yeah, he's a big boy who's gonna knock you on your nose, honey doll. Gonna whisk you away to the Big Apple like one swank shining diamond.
Oh God, you've been too kind. Endowing me with Lady Luck in this never-ending fantasy of jazzy music, back when America was still in its roaring youth, when men were broad-shouldered, richly tailored men and the women all dreamed of being Marilyn Monroe. Tailoring the way we melt together, ignoring the steps and the beats, the lulling romance of that ole 1-and-2-and-3. Yes, for once, you've been too good to me. I'm too completely suckered in, I can't believe this is real—I'm drowning in that good old-fashioned lover boy.
And when it fades, and the damsels woo the virgins with their black dresses and Smooth-talking City jive and their French names, and the men look for a brown-eyed Susan to sing them songs and watch Carson at night in their urbane suburban homes. That's when the waltz hums in our ears and tells us to just get it done with and kiss. I imagine him smiling that mega-watt smile he has and laughing in a rolling voice like aged wine would spill into a glass. And he does it for me, instantly winning me over and telling me of how I've already been long gone.
His hand is on my shoulder and I'm bowing back while he moves closer and closer, in only a way I've seen on the silver screen amongst murmured script lines of gold. And I can taste it finally. There are a billion stars in the skies that night, and I'm romancing them all and making them ever so jealous, and that envious moon… I've shamed them all. This utopia of a man kisses me ever so wonderfully and I'm lost. Lost and loving it.
He tastes like…
Champagne? Strawberries? Salt-water taffy? Something more seductive?
No, I think mistily as I begin to moan quietly into his mouth, it's something else, something cooler, much smoother against my lips, moist and delicious, but solid and slightly rough… something that tastes an awful lot like… like…
Raisin-bran cereal?
I instinctively whip my head up out of my cereal bowl as I start breathing in my skim milk, the stuff dripping down my face as I sit bolt up in my chair at the table where I had fallen asleep this morning. And when I open my eyes, the dream is gone. The lust bursts into something like pixie dust when I realize that I've been having a wine-wet dream while asleep in my cereal bowl, while being exactly fifteen minutes late for my first hour class. My quixotic man is gone along with his Roaring 20's world of black and white and his old-fashioned amour. I'm beginning to think that I should go into a diabetic coma from all the fluffy thoughts and just stay in that dream forever.
Well, at least my wet dreams are getting more creative, I think as I practically scream and burst out the door, grabbing my bag on the way and knocking over a vase, and kicking on my shoes as I run down the middle of the street towards school.
"Don't worry, I'm sure your delinquency will start turning around soon. I mean, how long can you possibly remain such an unprecedented force of absolute laziness? Bad manners? How much longer can possibly keep up this horrible sense of time, bad attendance, bombing every test that comes your way, and managing to somehow offend every girlfriend you've ever had without even trying?"
Over my copy of Slaughterhouse Five, there's one frown I've saved especially for the royal pain that I'm happy, and sometimes not so pleased, to call my friend Chang Wufei. Or one those unpleasant days when he manages to bristle all my scales in just the wrong direction, he could be Loose Change, Waffles, Fei-Bear, or any other degrading play on his name I can think of after my creative writing class. My eyes look across the table to where he usually sits and find a few ways to shoot fire at him with out twitching a muscle. Being around such smooth assholes like him has built me up quite the defense systems.
"How much longer do you think it's possible to live when I'm oh-so-close to asphyxiating you with your own damn hair?" I reply shortly.
"Yours would do much better, don't you think Maxwell?"
Even I have to admit he's cornered me in my own snide remark. "Screw me with a drumstick, why don't you?" I say sullenly and peer back down the black-ink lines of my book. "Besides, that's just my genius, and you wouldn't recognize any of that if it managed to poke you in the eye and blind you."
"I'm afraid you've already been blinded. It must be hard to breathe inside that cloud of ego," he says quietly, observing the school courtyard regally, smugly with those dark eyes of his. It begins a lovely little dance, spewed across the table in a fashion only brothers could spew it.
"Don't you have some candy to steal from little children?"
"Don't you have some satanic god you've neglected to sacrifice a chicken to lately?"
"Maybe you should go tighten your ponytail. You're not quite bitchy enough, Wufei."
With his tightly restrained black hair, there's a certain severity to the face of my friend Chang Wufei, and in the same sense a very precise, very Chinese beauty in his strong idealism and forceful, determined and righteous temperament. Of course, I would have never actually have said that to him.
You see, he's also a very—Well, my best friend Wufei is very straight man with an unavoidable and quiet obvious fondness for women, and I would hate to have some sort of awkward tension between me and my drummer if I had said that he was beautiful in anyway. Don't get me wrong, he's perfectly aware of my fancy for the home team, and more than once he's told me in his grunting, masculine way that it was fine with him, however I was. See? So sweet when he wants to be. The problem is that he just never wants to be. He's very good looking and actually a nice guy beneath all that fire—that's what makes him such a talented percussionist in my opinion, anyway—but it's a lot to handle at times.
But you'll never know Duo Maxwell to back down from a challenge if he can help it.
Oh yeah, that's me. How rude of me not to have introduced myself. I may run, and I may hide, but I never wear brown shoes with a blue suit. Or lie. That too.
After I fantasize about men in my cereal bowl and pajamas, I go to my high school like just about every other young person in this country and I loathe the homework that gets lopped on top of me and the pop-quizzes of the mathematical variety that are sprung mercilessly on me, but other than that I have another life. A secretive, wonderful life beyond what the textbooks can teach me, beyond what words are exchanged beside lockers about this it-couple, and that it-couple. No, I'm not a Japanese schoolgirl with a magical beast, an enchanted destiny, chasing villains on my rollerblades with a wise-talking cat... thing on my shoulder and my cute little skirt flying up in the air. I don't live a double life fighting crime, and I definitely don't transform or wear frills or any of that.
I'm a fucking rock star, baby.
What, don't believe me? Well, I'm sure we will be once we can get my stereo literally kicked back into shape and finally record a scratchy demo and get out of my garage, but you'd better believe it's true. Otherwise, I might not recognize you when I'm doused with so much limelight. I suppose that a band name also would help me take that step up to fame and fortune, but I'm not gonna sweat the little things yet. It's all about getting heard at this stage of the game. With my hand-me-down Rickenbacker, I have plans to stir up this town and stir me up a way out of this place, with my two best friends at my side.
I don't wear plaid and marry infamously skanky untouchables named Courtney, I don't bid you welcome to the jungle, piss off my bandmates and promptly pass out, and I don't play upside down and backwards and light my guitar aflame, but I have a damned good time and make the best music I can. Really, that's all the image I want. All I could handle.
From somewhere amongst the fray and dance of the cliques and tightknit circles of friends, between the interlocked arms of the sweet couples and the ones only in for the daily raunchiness they find in each other, emerges that other aforementioned friend. Now, you would think that I would have my share of the cynical, almost stony teenagers as friends, but naw, I thought I would reel in one more with Trowa Barton. The most silent of the silent, the regally restrained, and incredibly fast-fingered guitarist of my street punk trio, and a steady rock. Perhaps I'm masochistic to have such taciturn and stormy friends constantly at my side, but they are possibly the most loyal human beings I've met so far, and I refuse to let them go. With his front-combed mohawk hair blocking most of his view, he sits down with a tray and without a word starts sharing his food with us. From where we come from, none of us can really afford too much of the expensive lunches they serve at our school, so we convene on a single lunch tray, usually.
I wink playfully and thank Trowa and he grunts and returns it with a nod. He's sweet too, though I wouldn't admit it either. They're both so much like the brothers I missed in my growing up in a lonesome household, and I would never let any harm come to them while I'm still alive, not if I could help it. They're the only people I have, and there's no measure to what I would do for their sakes.
Yes, I think, balancing a French fry on my lip and gazing up into the sky, one day we'll ride music out of this town and onto better things than living at our teacher's commands and in the shadow of the yuppies uptown.
"Hey, Towa-towa," I venture slyly out loud using my most ridiculous handle for him, catching my taciturn guitarist's smoldering attention. I grin and get out, "Catch!" before flinging a French fry at his face. As always—I swear his nerves must work on gamma rays or something, it's always flawless—he whips his hand up in a blur and catches it, a few inches from his face, and exasperatedly tosses it back at my face. I catch it in my mouth and chew happily, turning to give Wufei a complacent expression before he has the chance to sigh wearily and stare down at his lunch.
I know he loves me—what a sweetie pie—makes you want to pinch his cheeks. Chh.
We're a bunch, I'll tell you.