Finals report: One down, three to go. Go me.
Welcome Distractions By Rapunzel
Chapter 6: Growing Attractions
Shower stalls provided nice places to think, Heero decided. No one would disturb you, and as long as the hot water didn't run out, you could stay in indefinitely. It was a chance to be grabbed at when living in a dorm where privacy was a fragile illusion.
So far, he had been standing in the shower for five minutes without actually doing anything except thinking. Duo was very confusing, and required a lot of thought. He'd seemed almost... disappointed that afternoon when Relena had offered her help. At first, he had thought that Duo merely felt bad because if Heero accepted Relena's help instead of his, it would leave him without a way to pay Heero back for the math tutoring. Now, however, he was beginning to wonder if there was more to it than that.
But surely Duo couldn't actually _like_ tutoring him, could he? Heero himself didn't particularly like having to explain things multiple times and be patient; Duo was the only person he was even willing to attempt it for. Still, that didn't mean Duo felt the same way. He might have been one of those people who was cut out for teaching.
Still, that didn't quite explain why he had seemed so upset. Surely, losing one student to another tutor wasn't a big deal. If Duo really wanted to help other people learn, there was no shortage of potential tutees. That left one other option for him to consider.
Heero idly reached a hand out for his shampoo bottle. Dumping a generous amount onto his palm, he began to rub it into his scalp as he considered the last option. Was it possible, just possible that Duo...
He pulled his hand away from his scalp as he considered it, but was suddenly distracted upon catching sight of his palm. His red, sticky palm...
An enraged howl rose from the men's bathroom.
~*~*~
Relena sat quietly in her room, reading over the chapter for her political science class. She kept expecting Dorothy to walk in, but she didn't. The other girl had vanished mysteriously about a half an hour ago with no explanation as to where she was going. She didn't have class, and it was too late for her to be at dinner. Relena knew that she was probably just off around campus somewhere, perfectly fine, but it was after dark, and she felt it was incumbent upon her as a roommate to worry a little.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Relena jerked in surprise and dropped her book as someone began pounding on her door. Rising, she went to answer it.
Heero stood outside her door, wearing nothing but a towel and an enraged expression.
"Oh!" Relena said, blushing profusely as she surveyed his chest, still covered with water droplets. "Heero. What are you doing here?"
"Where is she?!" he snarled, seeming oblivious to her scrutiny.
"Who?"
"Your roommate! When I get my hands on her..." He let the threat trail off in a growl as he stared around the Dorothy-free room.
"She's... out," Relena said, since she truly had no clue where her roommate was. "Why are you looking for her? Maybe I can take a message..." She silently said a little prayer of thanks that he wasn't looking at her, and therefore couldn't see how red her face was. Not that she wasn't enjoying the view...
"You tell her that if she ever touches my shampoo again, she's a dead woman!"
"What did she do to your shampoo?" Relena asked, startled. She tore her eyes away from his chest long enough to actually look at his head and realized that his hair was coated in a reddish, sticky substance.
"She replaced it with cough syrup!"
"No!" Relena cried in disbelief. "She wouldn't!"
"Then how do you explain this?!" he growled, focusing his attention on her long enough to shove a bottle labeled shampoo in her hands. On the bottom, in permanent marker, the initials "D. C." were scrawled.
Desperate to remove the blame from her roommate, Relena cast about for someone else in the building whose name started with a D. "Maybe it was Daniel from the third floor," she said.
"His last name is Roderick."
"Oh."
Heero seemed to realize at last that he was standing nearly naked in a hallway that had several female residents, some of whom were openly peering at him from their doorways. "Well," he muttered, "just tell her not to do it again."
"Okay. I will."
Turning around, Heero stalked back towards the bathroom, doing his best to ignore the appreciative looks of his female dorm mates. As soon as the bathroom door had closed behind him, Relena dared to pick up some papers from her desk to fan herself with. She could still feel her face burning.
One of the girls standing in her doorway just down the hall from Relena turned to her roommate. "See?" she said. "I told you there were advantages to living on the same floor as the guys' bathroom."
~*~*~
"What in the world were you thinking?"
Dorothy shut the door behind her and turned to face her roommate, who was giving her a half bewildered, half accusatory stare. "Huh?"
"Doing that to poor Heero."
"Oh." She smiled. "So, he found out about the shampoo, did he?"
"So it was you."
"Oh yes. Did you get to ogle to your heart's content?"
Relena didn't answer, but the crimson blush that spread up her cheeks was answer enough.
"You don't have to thank me," Dorothy said breezily. "What else are roommates for?"
~*~*~
Slinging his towel over his shoulder, Wufei strode up the stairs to the second floor. He had to fit his shower in at least an hour before he went to bed in order for his hair to dry properly, and since he had just finished one of his reading assignments, now seemed like the perfect time. There was only one slight problem.
"Damn it!" he muttered as he retrieved the shampoo bottle from the back of his locker in the bathroom. "I knew I was forgetting something." He had meant to go to the store to buy more shampoo, but it had completely slipped his mind.
He was seriously considering a late night trip to the store when he noticed that Heero's locker was slightly open. /Heero won't mind if I use some of his shampoo,/ he decided.
Five minutes later, the second floor echoed with an enraged cry.
"YUY!!!!"
The door to the men's bathroom burst open, and a rather irate Wufei came striding out, wrapped in a towel, flop-flops flopping against the floor as he ran for the stairwell. "Yuy, you're a dead man!"
Two girls peered out from their doorway to watch him pass, then looked at each other.
"That's twice in one night," one said.
The second one turned to look down the hall once again. "I'd say leaving the door open wasn't all together a bad idea."
Her roommate nodded in fervent agreement.
~*~*~
The next day...
"Darn her," Duo muttered. "Shot my end of the bargain to hell in under five minutes. That's got to be a new record."
He sighed and shuffled through his math notes again. Since Heero no longer needed him to tutor him in English, Duo was betting that his math tutoring was also going to end. So he hadn't bothered waiting for Heero near the entrance of the library like he usually did. He had, however, staked out a chair at their usual table once his shift was over, just in case. He knew that Heero was unlikely to show up, since, as Relena had pointed out, climbing the stairs to the second floor was easier than coming all the way to the library. It was a forlorn hope, but he clung to it nonetheless.
He felt rather irritated with Relena, although he knew it wasn't really her fault. Still, the fact remained that because of her, his Heero-watching time was likely to be cut down significantly. He certainly had no intentions of giving up yet; he was still planning on spending several nights a week at the dinning hall. He refused to give up until Heero himself made it plain that his presence was unwanted.
/The only reason he probably hasn't done that already is because he hasn't figured out that you're hitting on him,/ Duo reminded himself. For all he liked Heero, he would be the first to admit that the other man was one of the densest people he'd ever met when it came to flirting. So far, that was working to his advantage, since once Heero figured out that Duo was interested, he was likely to go running for the hills.
"Bloody hell!" Duo muttered, slamming his fist against the desk. He would have loved to think that Heero was gay, or at least bi, but knew that the chances of that were pretty slim.
"Math homework bugging you?"
Duo jumped, but when he turned around to face the speaker, his face was lit up with a smile. "Heero! You came!"
"Yeah. Sorry I'm late." Heero set his book bag down and pulled out a chair to sit in. "I went and got my TA to look over my stuff like you said."
"And?"
"And she said that the outline was a good start, but that what I have of the essay so far needs work."
"Well, let's work on it then," Duo said.
"What about your math homework?"
"Oh, I'm almost done," Duo said, waving that away. "Tell you what. How about you look over my math homework while I look over what you have of the essay so far?"
Heero agreed, and they exchanged papers. Duo found that he had to force himself to concentrate on Heero's essay; he was too busy doing mental victory cries. For reasons best known to himself, Heero had come back.
"Looks good," Heero was saying, and Duo forced himself to concentrate on the real world again long enough to accept his math homework.
"Thanks. Your TA was right; this could use some improvement. You've got a couple of run on sentences, and one that starts with 'and'. Who's your teacher, by the way?"
"Professor Mortle," Heero answered.
"Ah," Duo made a knowing sound. "He's the one who has the rule of no more than four 'to be' verbs per page, right?"
"Yup," Heero said dismally. "I hate that stupid rule."
"So did I," Duo said. "I had him last year." He bent his head and began underlining the various grammatical errors in Heero's paper, but he kept stealing glances at the young man sitting next to him.
Heero finally noticed the scrutiny. "What?"
"Did you go to Relena for help with this?" Duo asked casually.
"No," Heero answered. "I'm not going near her room right now."
"Why not?"
"Because if I do, I might just kill her roommate." Seeing Duo's questioning look, Heero went off into an account of the previous night's shampoo disaster. By the time he was done, Duo was snorting with laughter, trying to control himself so as not to make too much noise.
"Ah, dorm life," he said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. "How I miss it. Stuff like that just doesn't happen as much once you move into an apartment."
"Than I can't wait to get an apartment," Heero said, but he looked much less angry than he had at the beginning of his account.
Duo grinned at him once more before going back to the paper.
~*~*~
"What do you mean, you've forgiven her?" Wufei said, looking at Heero as though he had lost his mind. "That evil, conniving woman made you put cough syrup in your hair, and you've already forgiven her?"
Heero shrugged. "When you look at it from a detached point of view, it was pretty funny."
"Funny?!" Wufei sputtered.
"Duo thought it was funny."
"I don't care what Duo thinks!"
/I do,/ Heero thought, but refrained from saying anything aloud. Wufei wouldn't have listened anyway; he was too busy muttering bad things about Dorothy under his breath. Finally, sending one last incredulous look at his roommate, he stalked out of the room and slammed the door.
Heero wasn't perturbed. He hoped up onto his bad and sprawled across it, relishing the sudden quiet. It gave him more time to think about Duo. Suddenly, he was finding that more of his thoughts seemed to center around that particular young man. Either that, or they had for a while, and he was only just now noticing it.
He was having a hard time rationalizing his reasons for continuing to have Duo tutor him in English. At first, he put it down to Dorothy's prank, but that wasn't it. He could just as easily have had Relena work with him in the lounge. Then he explained it to himself by saying that Duo was a second year student, and therefore had had to write more papers, so he had more practice. That one didn't quite fly either, since Relena had had plenty of practice in high school.
Now, as he lay mulling it over, he realized that, having ruled out everything else, there was a very simple reason for him to keep going to the library. He simply enjoyed Duo's company. He would have been the first to admit that he was not a social person by nature, but around Duo, he found himself talking more than he usually did. He smiled more too...
It wasn't that he didn't like Relena; he hardly knew her. However, he had always been rather uncomfortable around girls. He had never really been that interested in them, and he kept getting the feeling that they expected something from him, something he couldn't deliver. Sometimes he felt like Duo expected something from him too, but it didn't bother him.
Sighing, Heero levered himself up and went to his computer to work on his infernal English essay. /After all, I have to have something for Duo to read tomorrow./
tbc
Author's note: The cough syrup scenes appear courtesy of M.E., who gave me the idea.
Welcome Distractions By Rapunzel
Chapter 6: Growing Attractions
Shower stalls provided nice places to think, Heero decided. No one would disturb you, and as long as the hot water didn't run out, you could stay in indefinitely. It was a chance to be grabbed at when living in a dorm where privacy was a fragile illusion.
So far, he had been standing in the shower for five minutes without actually doing anything except thinking. Duo was very confusing, and required a lot of thought. He'd seemed almost... disappointed that afternoon when Relena had offered her help. At first, he had thought that Duo merely felt bad because if Heero accepted Relena's help instead of his, it would leave him without a way to pay Heero back for the math tutoring. Now, however, he was beginning to wonder if there was more to it than that.
But surely Duo couldn't actually _like_ tutoring him, could he? Heero himself didn't particularly like having to explain things multiple times and be patient; Duo was the only person he was even willing to attempt it for. Still, that didn't mean Duo felt the same way. He might have been one of those people who was cut out for teaching.
Still, that didn't quite explain why he had seemed so upset. Surely, losing one student to another tutor wasn't a big deal. If Duo really wanted to help other people learn, there was no shortage of potential tutees. That left one other option for him to consider.
Heero idly reached a hand out for his shampoo bottle. Dumping a generous amount onto his palm, he began to rub it into his scalp as he considered the last option. Was it possible, just possible that Duo...
He pulled his hand away from his scalp as he considered it, but was suddenly distracted upon catching sight of his palm. His red, sticky palm...
An enraged howl rose from the men's bathroom.
~*~*~
Relena sat quietly in her room, reading over the chapter for her political science class. She kept expecting Dorothy to walk in, but she didn't. The other girl had vanished mysteriously about a half an hour ago with no explanation as to where she was going. She didn't have class, and it was too late for her to be at dinner. Relena knew that she was probably just off around campus somewhere, perfectly fine, but it was after dark, and she felt it was incumbent upon her as a roommate to worry a little.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Relena jerked in surprise and dropped her book as someone began pounding on her door. Rising, she went to answer it.
Heero stood outside her door, wearing nothing but a towel and an enraged expression.
"Oh!" Relena said, blushing profusely as she surveyed his chest, still covered with water droplets. "Heero. What are you doing here?"
"Where is she?!" he snarled, seeming oblivious to her scrutiny.
"Who?"
"Your roommate! When I get my hands on her..." He let the threat trail off in a growl as he stared around the Dorothy-free room.
"She's... out," Relena said, since she truly had no clue where her roommate was. "Why are you looking for her? Maybe I can take a message..." She silently said a little prayer of thanks that he wasn't looking at her, and therefore couldn't see how red her face was. Not that she wasn't enjoying the view...
"You tell her that if she ever touches my shampoo again, she's a dead woman!"
"What did she do to your shampoo?" Relena asked, startled. She tore her eyes away from his chest long enough to actually look at his head and realized that his hair was coated in a reddish, sticky substance.
"She replaced it with cough syrup!"
"No!" Relena cried in disbelief. "She wouldn't!"
"Then how do you explain this?!" he growled, focusing his attention on her long enough to shove a bottle labeled shampoo in her hands. On the bottom, in permanent marker, the initials "D. C." were scrawled.
Desperate to remove the blame from her roommate, Relena cast about for someone else in the building whose name started with a D. "Maybe it was Daniel from the third floor," she said.
"His last name is Roderick."
"Oh."
Heero seemed to realize at last that he was standing nearly naked in a hallway that had several female residents, some of whom were openly peering at him from their doorways. "Well," he muttered, "just tell her not to do it again."
"Okay. I will."
Turning around, Heero stalked back towards the bathroom, doing his best to ignore the appreciative looks of his female dorm mates. As soon as the bathroom door had closed behind him, Relena dared to pick up some papers from her desk to fan herself with. She could still feel her face burning.
One of the girls standing in her doorway just down the hall from Relena turned to her roommate. "See?" she said. "I told you there were advantages to living on the same floor as the guys' bathroom."
~*~*~
"What in the world were you thinking?"
Dorothy shut the door behind her and turned to face her roommate, who was giving her a half bewildered, half accusatory stare. "Huh?"
"Doing that to poor Heero."
"Oh." She smiled. "So, he found out about the shampoo, did he?"
"So it was you."
"Oh yes. Did you get to ogle to your heart's content?"
Relena didn't answer, but the crimson blush that spread up her cheeks was answer enough.
"You don't have to thank me," Dorothy said breezily. "What else are roommates for?"
~*~*~
Slinging his towel over his shoulder, Wufei strode up the stairs to the second floor. He had to fit his shower in at least an hour before he went to bed in order for his hair to dry properly, and since he had just finished one of his reading assignments, now seemed like the perfect time. There was only one slight problem.
"Damn it!" he muttered as he retrieved the shampoo bottle from the back of his locker in the bathroom. "I knew I was forgetting something." He had meant to go to the store to buy more shampoo, but it had completely slipped his mind.
He was seriously considering a late night trip to the store when he noticed that Heero's locker was slightly open. /Heero won't mind if I use some of his shampoo,/ he decided.
Five minutes later, the second floor echoed with an enraged cry.
"YUY!!!!"
The door to the men's bathroom burst open, and a rather irate Wufei came striding out, wrapped in a towel, flop-flops flopping against the floor as he ran for the stairwell. "Yuy, you're a dead man!"
Two girls peered out from their doorway to watch him pass, then looked at each other.
"That's twice in one night," one said.
The second one turned to look down the hall once again. "I'd say leaving the door open wasn't all together a bad idea."
Her roommate nodded in fervent agreement.
~*~*~
The next day...
"Darn her," Duo muttered. "Shot my end of the bargain to hell in under five minutes. That's got to be a new record."
He sighed and shuffled through his math notes again. Since Heero no longer needed him to tutor him in English, Duo was betting that his math tutoring was also going to end. So he hadn't bothered waiting for Heero near the entrance of the library like he usually did. He had, however, staked out a chair at their usual table once his shift was over, just in case. He knew that Heero was unlikely to show up, since, as Relena had pointed out, climbing the stairs to the second floor was easier than coming all the way to the library. It was a forlorn hope, but he clung to it nonetheless.
He felt rather irritated with Relena, although he knew it wasn't really her fault. Still, the fact remained that because of her, his Heero-watching time was likely to be cut down significantly. He certainly had no intentions of giving up yet; he was still planning on spending several nights a week at the dinning hall. He refused to give up until Heero himself made it plain that his presence was unwanted.
/The only reason he probably hasn't done that already is because he hasn't figured out that you're hitting on him,/ Duo reminded himself. For all he liked Heero, he would be the first to admit that the other man was one of the densest people he'd ever met when it came to flirting. So far, that was working to his advantage, since once Heero figured out that Duo was interested, he was likely to go running for the hills.
"Bloody hell!" Duo muttered, slamming his fist against the desk. He would have loved to think that Heero was gay, or at least bi, but knew that the chances of that were pretty slim.
"Math homework bugging you?"
Duo jumped, but when he turned around to face the speaker, his face was lit up with a smile. "Heero! You came!"
"Yeah. Sorry I'm late." Heero set his book bag down and pulled out a chair to sit in. "I went and got my TA to look over my stuff like you said."
"And?"
"And she said that the outline was a good start, but that what I have of the essay so far needs work."
"Well, let's work on it then," Duo said.
"What about your math homework?"
"Oh, I'm almost done," Duo said, waving that away. "Tell you what. How about you look over my math homework while I look over what you have of the essay so far?"
Heero agreed, and they exchanged papers. Duo found that he had to force himself to concentrate on Heero's essay; he was too busy doing mental victory cries. For reasons best known to himself, Heero had come back.
"Looks good," Heero was saying, and Duo forced himself to concentrate on the real world again long enough to accept his math homework.
"Thanks. Your TA was right; this could use some improvement. You've got a couple of run on sentences, and one that starts with 'and'. Who's your teacher, by the way?"
"Professor Mortle," Heero answered.
"Ah," Duo made a knowing sound. "He's the one who has the rule of no more than four 'to be' verbs per page, right?"
"Yup," Heero said dismally. "I hate that stupid rule."
"So did I," Duo said. "I had him last year." He bent his head and began underlining the various grammatical errors in Heero's paper, but he kept stealing glances at the young man sitting next to him.
Heero finally noticed the scrutiny. "What?"
"Did you go to Relena for help with this?" Duo asked casually.
"No," Heero answered. "I'm not going near her room right now."
"Why not?"
"Because if I do, I might just kill her roommate." Seeing Duo's questioning look, Heero went off into an account of the previous night's shampoo disaster. By the time he was done, Duo was snorting with laughter, trying to control himself so as not to make too much noise.
"Ah, dorm life," he said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. "How I miss it. Stuff like that just doesn't happen as much once you move into an apartment."
"Than I can't wait to get an apartment," Heero said, but he looked much less angry than he had at the beginning of his account.
Duo grinned at him once more before going back to the paper.
~*~*~
"What do you mean, you've forgiven her?" Wufei said, looking at Heero as though he had lost his mind. "That evil, conniving woman made you put cough syrup in your hair, and you've already forgiven her?"
Heero shrugged. "When you look at it from a detached point of view, it was pretty funny."
"Funny?!" Wufei sputtered.
"Duo thought it was funny."
"I don't care what Duo thinks!"
/I do,/ Heero thought, but refrained from saying anything aloud. Wufei wouldn't have listened anyway; he was too busy muttering bad things about Dorothy under his breath. Finally, sending one last incredulous look at his roommate, he stalked out of the room and slammed the door.
Heero wasn't perturbed. He hoped up onto his bad and sprawled across it, relishing the sudden quiet. It gave him more time to think about Duo. Suddenly, he was finding that more of his thoughts seemed to center around that particular young man. Either that, or they had for a while, and he was only just now noticing it.
He was having a hard time rationalizing his reasons for continuing to have Duo tutor him in English. At first, he put it down to Dorothy's prank, but that wasn't it. He could just as easily have had Relena work with him in the lounge. Then he explained it to himself by saying that Duo was a second year student, and therefore had had to write more papers, so he had more practice. That one didn't quite fly either, since Relena had had plenty of practice in high school.
Now, as he lay mulling it over, he realized that, having ruled out everything else, there was a very simple reason for him to keep going to the library. He simply enjoyed Duo's company. He would have been the first to admit that he was not a social person by nature, but around Duo, he found himself talking more than he usually did. He smiled more too...
It wasn't that he didn't like Relena; he hardly knew her. However, he had always been rather uncomfortable around girls. He had never really been that interested in them, and he kept getting the feeling that they expected something from him, something he couldn't deliver. Sometimes he felt like Duo expected something from him too, but it didn't bother him.
Sighing, Heero levered himself up and went to his computer to work on his infernal English essay. /After all, I have to have something for Duo to read tomorrow./
tbc
Author's note: The cough syrup scenes appear courtesy of M.E., who gave me the idea.