Warning: More gooey shounen-ai-ness, only gooeyer (gooier? gooeier? more gooey.) than before.
Disclaimer: If the Easter Bunny gave anyone any chocolate pilots, I wanna know about it. =P (Oh, and, all the best characters in this story were made by someone else, darnit. So don't sue me.)
~~~~~~~~~~Episode Eighty: Red Light, Green Light
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder." ~Francis DavidsonApril 28th, 1903
Innocently, unsuspectingly, Bethany was doing her daily dusting on the second floor. There was an eerie quiet as she moved from the nursery to the green guest room, lightly passing her duster over the wall between the two doors to pick up any loose particles on the wallpaper. There was absolutely no warning when she disappeared into the green guest room, and the silence persisted, until...
"Eeeeeeeek!"
There was a sharp slapping noise, after which Bethany ran out of the green guest room in a terrible state, frantic and clutching her bottom through the folds of her dress. She ran all the way down the hall and up the stairs to her attic room without stopping to look behind her.
Then, the sandy head of Tristan slowly poked out into the hall from the green guest room, glancing sadly after his escaped prey. Better luck next time.
**********Catherine had always thought of Heero as her favourite tenant, but lately he was getting on her nerves, severely. He didn't have a job, didn't have anywhere to go in the morning, and actually seemed...lonely, a trait that seemed highly uncharacteristic. Most mornings, he followed her around the pub while she cleaned up before opening, looking over her shoulder and constantly asking if there was anything he could do to help. She tried giving him chores, but he was so efficient that the work seemed to be done even before she finished asking for it. He was, despite all his lessons in charm and sensitivity, driving her up the bloody wall.
As a desperation move one morning, she marched him into a chair and forced a newspaper into his hands, taking advantage of the few hours every day when the pub was empty. "Heero, I don't know how this tiny detail escaped you," she said, pulling up another chair beside him, turning it backwards and straddling it in a very unladylike way, "but nobody's going to just walk up and hand you a job. If you want work, you have to go looking for it."
While she prodded Heero to open the paper to the help wanted section, he thought about what she said. Grand total, he had only had two jobs his whole life, and he didn't have to look for either one of them. "You could be right," he muttered as he glanced up and down the page.
"Atta boy," said Catherine, and she rested her chin on her folded arms atop the back of the chair to watch. Heero perched his right ankle on the opposite knee, gave the opened paper a shake to straighten out the pages, and perused the employment selection.
The 'Help Wanted' advertisements were quite clearly separated into 'male' and 'female', with the higher-paying and more intellectual positions consistently going to the men. Sally would not have been pleased to see him endorsing such behaviour, but Heero wasn't concerned with making social commentary about it. "Now, what do we have here...bricklayer. I'm not a bricklayer. Silversmith...I can polish it, but that's about it. Printer...glazier.....engine maker......." He went silent as his eyes travelled further down the list, and he realized that he really wasn't qualified to do anything. "...what would you recommend for someone who has very few skills that are marketable in the real world?"
Catherine pointed to a small, nondescript ad next to a person offering to buy scrap copper. "Errand boy."
Heero wrinkled his nose. "That can't pay very much..."
She pointed again. "Alright then...dock worker. Twenty shillings a week."
"...it says I'd have to join the union."
"So join the union."
"I don't want to."
"Why not?"
"Unions scare me."
"How come?"
"I don't know." Heero could feel the waves of impatience coursing off Catherine's brow. He quickly skimmed the next three columns and stopped at a prestigious-looking ad with a border around it. "Law clerk! That looks rather interesting..." It conjured up images of assisting top barristers in high-profile murder cases, full of science, intrigue, and women with too much makeup pretending to cry in the witness box. An exciting life indeed! Heero took out his pen and drew a big circle around 'Law Clerk.'
"...they'll make you cut your hair," Catherine commented.
Heero took out his pen and drew a big 'X' through 'Law Clerk.'
Catherine huffed out a sigh and sat straight up, gripping the chair back with both hands. "Oh, come on, now! You're not even trying! If you can turn your nose up at everything in the paper when there are millions of decent people out of work, then you'd better be prepared to get out there and pound the pavement! Knock on doors! Introduce yourself! When my mother's brother-in-law lost his job to a fire in the textile factory, he got a job as a coach driver the very next day! Mr. Featherstone's company...it's only down the street a few blocks, you could go there right now."
Heero had turned the page while she was talking, and without missing a beat, he quoted from a glaring notice near the bottom. "Featherstone's Stagecoach Company, going-out-of business sale. Auctioning off all vehicles, horses, uniforms and sundries. Everything must go." He turned to give her a kind of self-satisfied glare, holding up the page as proof. "That Mr. Featherstone?"
"...oh." Catherine's face fell. "Well, I blame the trains. Stupid modern gizmos have taken all the romance out of travel."
With an eyebrow shrug, Heero turned back to the want ads, less than enthusiastically. "I have a terrible feeling I'm going to end up down a coal mine," he moaned. It felt good to moan. He hadn't had much practice at it, but it was coming easier lately, perhaps because Duo hadn't shown up last night, or the night before. It was making him cranky.
"Why don't you do what my father did when he left school?" Catherine asked.
"What's that?"
"Join the navy."
Heero really hadn't kept the military in mind, for obvious reasons, but he chose to voice a more Catherine-acceptable excuse. "Then I'd be shipped out, and I'd be away from Duo," he said, before thinking about how it sounded.
Catherine shrugged innocently. "Then why don't you both join?"
He thought about that. Knowing Duo and the touchy-feely way he'd been carrying on lately, he had visions of them being caught in a closet together somewhere below decks, half-dressed, followed by a court-martial, a horse-whipping, being made to walk the plank, or a combination of all three. He thought about it again. "I don't think so."
"Picky, picky, picky," Catherine scolded, and just as she did, her telephone gave a clattery ring from behind the bar. She rose to answer it, continuing her lecture as she walked. "You know, unless you've got a secret nest egg, or a scholarship to some fancy university, you haven't got a prayer. You'd better get real flexible, real fast." She picked up the earpiece of the clunky wooden box fastened to the wall next to the swinging kitchen doors, and spoke to the operator. A few words later, she stepped back and called out to the unproductive lump on the other side of the room. "It's for you."
Blinking with surprise, Heero flung the newspaper onto the nearest table and took possession of the earpiece. The conversation was brief but filled with disappointed noises and hasty promises, and afterwards he hung up the earpiece and slowly turned around with his hands in his pockets. "That was Duo. He was going to come over this afternoon, but he suddenly can't."
"What's wrong."
"...he can't afford to. He's overdrawn on his allowance." The words came out with all the blandness of a railway schedule, and none of the credibility. Duo knew, on the other end of the line, that his explanation of events was holey like Swiss cheese, but there was no time to talk before the new butler came marching through on his rounds, caught a downstairs person upstairs, and put the miscreant's name down in his little leather book of doom, which would have upset the balance of the entire universe.
Catherine just folded her arms and shook her head. "You men...totally helpless about money." She left him standing with that thought, off to balance the book of accounts and count out the week's wages again.
**********Bertram Augustus thought most assuredly that he heard a hushed voice in the north hall, but as he rounded the corner coming off the main staircase, there was no one there. He walked slowly past the telephone on the Chippendale table, noticing that the slender black instrument had been very slightly moved. Taking out his handkerchief so that he wouldn't have to touch anything that had been recently touched by someone else, he gently nudged it a quarter of an inch back to its original position, looked carefully in all directions for the guilty party, and then reversed direction heading for the parlour. As soon as he was gone, an angular wood panel underneath the stairs creaked open, and Duo slipped out of the little crawlspace hidden behind it, swiftly latching it shut again and sprinting back to the kitchen. At least being a thief still came in handy once in awhile.
Back in his old domain, the chef was finally able to relax a bit, but his nerves were still critically on edge. The whole kitchen had been placed on a strict budget, and every solitary coin had to be accounted for, recorded, rationalized, explained. No unnecessary expenditures whatsoever. This meant that Duo could no longer sneak a little money out to pay for cab rides and train fares, thereby firmly re-seeding him in the weedy garden that was the lower class. It sucked to be poor, again.
His other problem was standing at the kitchen table, deftly whipping together a soufflé with about as much effort as it takes a person to tie their shoes. Merlyn was a miracle-worker in the kitchen, and more than made up for her bohemian looks in cooking savvy and imaginative recipes. She also seemed to have made all the sandwiches for lunch, and even hand-squeezed the lemons for the season's first batch of lemonade. Duo stuck his hands in his denims pockets and sauntered up with a snide snarl already in place. "So...anything I can do to, uh...help?"
"Not really," Merlyn tweeted in her sing-song way. "Soup's on the boil, parfaits are in the icebox, and this is going in the oven any second."
Duo squinted. That didn't sound anything like the lunch menu he had planned. "Um...I wasn't really thinking along the lines of soufflé and parfait and anything else that rhymes, I thought maybe something simple, like those little chocolate frosty cookie things in the purple tin."
Merlyn looked sweetly amused, but wasn't looking directly at him. "Were you really? Oh, how jolly! Be a dear and give the lemonade a quick stir, would you?"
Duo had learned fairly quickly that there wasn't much point in arguing with the woman. Once she had made up her mind about something, she could tune out a herd of elephants tramping through the kitchen. All in all, it was better just to stir the damn lemonade and get on with something else, like getting his hiding place ready for Heero when he arrived that afternoon, as he promised he would. With resignation, he walked around the table to the drawer next to the washbasin, where he kept the long wooden spoons, but when he opened it, the spoons were gone. Instead there was a vegetable brush, some dishcloths, and a few other things that were usually kept in the drawer on the other side of the washbasin. Leaving the first drawer open, Duo went to the second drawer, opened it, and found the tin opener and the pastry blender, which were usually in the ugly blue jar sitting on the far end of the counter. He went to the jar and found the egg whisk. He went to the drawer that usually had the egg whisk in it, and it was empty. A huge section of his kitchen had been mysteriously rearranged without his knowledge or consent. This was inexcusable. He wheeled on Merlyn and folded his arms angrily. "What's been going on in here?"
"Hm?" It took her a moment to look up after closing the oven door on the delicate soufflé. "Oh, I see! I did a bit of shuffling while you were out fetching ingredients."
"I already had this place perfectly arranged so that everything was right where I needed it!" Duo shouted, irked by her perpetual smile.
"Yes, but now everything's arranged so it makes sense," Merlyn chirped. She went straight on to some other pre-lunch task and forgot all about him.
Duo fumed. He stalked all around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors and grumbling inwardly about what they contained, or didn't contain that they should have. It was all wrong, all of it. The whole room was wrong. Suddenly it didn't feel like his kitchen anymore. The walls were closing in on him, and he was running out of air. Teeth gritted and fists clenched, he stormed out to Trowa and Quatre's room, shut the door, picked up a pillow, pressed it to his face, and screamed into it. That felt somewhat better, but it would only get worse later when he saw what else Merlyn had done to the kitchen...
**********A good day was getting harder and harder to find at Bridlewood. Trowa hadn't seen one in more than a week, and they seemed to be getting progressively worse. First, Otto ordered a scratchy red uniform jacket for him, similar to Tristan's, and he had to wear it all the time, whether he was driving the coach anywhere or not. He could tell it was going to be murder wearing it all summer, but at least he looked a little more stylish than Quatre, who had been banned from wearing anything but tacky overalls. Still, he wasn't getting any breaks when it came to his chores; Otto had demanded a full tune-up for all the joints and moving parts in the entire carriage, and Trowa was somehow supposed to give it a total spring-clean without getting his new red jacket dirty. He hoped he might at least be able to take the silly thing off in the carriage house, but with Otto constantly entertaining strangers that wanted to see the grounds in all their springtime splendour, one could never know.
After lunch, he headed for a storeroom in the cellar which held a few specialized tools that weren't kept in the carriage house because of space constraints. He knew the room so well that he could navigate the shelves and cabinets in the dark, and so he didn't bother bringing a lantern because he felt sure that he could locate the items he needed purely by touch. It was therefore a total surprise when he slammed his foot into something big and heavy on the floor that wasn't supposed to be there, and let off a quiet stream of obscenities in Spanish as he hopped around on the other foot.
Hobbling out of the room, he eventually returned with a lantern, intent on glaring on the foreign object that had the nerve to insert itself in front of his boot. It was a box, a heavy-gauge cardboard box with the flaps folded together on top and a note pinned to it. Scowling, Trowa bent down and snatched the note off its pin, and read it.
"These are not cookbooks and therefore belong somewhere other than the kitchen. Please relocate them."
It was a woman's handwriting, and since it referred to the kitchen, Trowa guessed that the note was from Merlyn. He had a vague memory of her shuffling around objects in the kitchen when he slipped out after one cup of coffee that morning, anxious to get away from her sun-shiney bubbliness, but he knew of no details relating to this box. Suddenly brimming with contempt, he placed one foot on the top edge nearest to him on the box, gave it a mighty shove, and knocked it over, loosening the folded flaps and spilling some of the books inside onto the floor. It gave him a momentary rush of power, and then it was back to searching for the tools, but after he found them, and began to step over the mess of books to get back out the door, something strange caught his attention.
One of the books sitting on the top of the pile had fallen open, somewhere in the middle. It was fairly large, and black, and it was full of photographs, but something about the photographs didn't look quite right, even at a distance. Carefully finding a place for his feet this time, Trowa crouched down and gave the book a closer inspection, bringing the lantern right down to fully illuminate the pages, and then it hit him. There were several people in the exposed photographs, but none of them was wearing a stitch. He was staring at two huge pages of naked cavorters, revelling in all manner of lascivious acts. For one paralysing moment, he wondered if there had been hidden cameras in the crimson den where he and Quatre had been drugged and trapped, but then reassured himself that he didn't recognize anyone pictured. Even if there had been cameras present, the people in front of them would have had to hold those unnatural poses for several minutes while the film was exposed to their exposure, and he couldn't remember anyone in the den holding still for that long. After a deep, cleansing breath, he dared to reach out and turn the page, quickly and carefully as if the paper could actually burn him, and he found more of the same. Page after page of lurid, depraved sin in various shades of black and white.
He should have put it back in the box, or at least looked away, but his arm moved under its own power to reach out and pick up the devilish volume. He couldn't seem to stop it. Now the book was in his hand, and before he could raise a mental protest, it was tucked under his arm. A tiny, filthy grain of his consciousness wanted to keep it, even though the rest of him was highly dubious of the idea, and making him aware of it by giving him sweaty palms and a very dry mouth. Looking all around him to make doubly, even triply sure that no one was watching him, he crept out of the storeroom and made a hasty and highly secretive stop in his room before continuing on to the carriage house.
**********If one went through the pantry, past the scullery, and down a long hall that connected half a dozen other rooms dedicated to the service of laundry, dishes, and hot running water, one arrived at a murky little room that still had giant hooks dangling from the ceiling from the olden days when the family would buy an entire side of beef and hack bits off of it as needed. It was easily the coldest room in the house, set well into the ground with no heating ducts and only a tiny window at the top of the outside wall, in the bit of the north wall that was in constant shade from the fence. The room laid unused for decades, until Duo found himself stuck at the manor without a bed. He didn't have the money to get across town, and his old room in the attic had been expanded into by the housemaids. Reduced to spreading a threadbare bedsheet on the floor and sleeping huddled up in a little ball wrapped in his plaid blanket, Duo found his lifestyle rapidly deteriorating into what it was before he ever met Heero.
He had to stand on a chair to reach the tiny window in the top of the wall, and for close to an hour he stared out at a miniscule patch of shaded grass until he saw a pair of shiny black shoes creeping around the house. "Psst!" he called out to them.
The shoes stopped, as their owner looked left, right, up, and finally, down. Heero crouched down on his hands and knees and peered into the open window. "...what are you doing down there?"
"Just...can you get through this thing?" Duo huffed in frustration, tapping the window frame.
Heero looked at the steepish drop from the window to the floor, thought about it for a moment, then straightened up and took off his black jacket, passing it through the window to Duo. He motioned for the chair to be taken away, and Duo did so without question. Then, flattening himself out on the grass, Heero slithered through the window head-first and seemed to crawl down the wall, defying gravity, until he could just squeeze his legs through. Then, still holding himself up by the fingertips pressed against the interior wall, he pushed off the window frame with both feet, flipped over, and landed in a tidy crouch in the centre of the room. Duo spontaneously applauded, it was that spectacular. "Nice to know I'm still good at something," Heero quipped as he stood and dusted himself off.
Duo couldn't stand there another second and not be physically attached to Heero, so with the jacket still dangling from one hand, he hugged his friend tightly and sighed. "Missed you big time," he said quietly.
With an almost parental smile, Heero returned the hug, and then looked around at the room, particularly at the blanket rolled up on the floor. There was a moth-eaten pillow too, with feathers creeping out of several unwanted holes, and an alarm clock. "Have you been sleeping down here?" he asked with needless shock.
Loosening his grip, Duo leaned back and frowned. "It's been awful around here with all these new people," he whined. "This was the only corner of the house I could claim for myself, now that I'm not allowed upstairs anymore! And the new guy that's in charge has no sense of humour! I made him this great little sponge cake and drew a frowny face with fangs on it on top to let him know he's being a jerk to everyone, and he put my name down in his book again!"
Always willing to practice his sarcasm, Heero ground the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other, looking menacing, but with a small smirk. "Want me to have a quiet word with him?"
Duo considered it, but not for long. "Nah, you don't need to mess up his face, he's ugly enough."
"Really, I don't mind...it's not as if I've got anything better to do..."
As Heero's tone turned sombre, Duo glanced down at the concrete floor, and at the various discolourations that decorated it unpleasantly. "No job yet?"
Though it was difficult to detect, Heero was slightly ashamed of his failure, especially as he had more and more time to think about the morning argument in the pub. He shook his head, letting the silence speak for itself a moment or two. "And until I find something, there's no chance of getting a place of our own. We can't even afford to pay Catherine much longer."
In unison, they leaned against the wall with the window in it, and stared across the tiny room at a waist-high wooden table, which, aside from the wobbly chair, was the only real furniture to be seen. Duo glanced here and there with a worried pout. "Well, what can we afford?"
Heero jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "A hammock tied between two trees in the back yard." Then he waved a hand in a general circle, pointing widely at the concrete hole they were in. "Or this."
"That's it!?"
"Unless we dip into the emergency fund."
Duo pushed off the wall and stood in front of Heero, his eyes a bit wild with desperation. "So dip! We can't go on like this and you know it!"
Heero couldn't even look Duo in the eye at that particular moment. Catherine was right. He was overqualified, under-experienced, and far too picky. "I thought it would be easier, but...I'm just not suited to the sort of work normal people do every day. I don't know what I'll be doing a year from now...a month from now...even tomorrow. It's very disorienting."
His black jacket was still in Duo's hands, and the chef fiddled with the collar a bit, looking down as well. He knew it was still a lot to expect of Heero to just blend in with society after only two years' exposure to it. It was as if he had moved to reality from a foreign country that wasn't on any map, and it took a long time to learn the language from scratch. "And I guess you look at regular people in the street and figure they've got it all together, and you'll never have that, huh? I know how that feels..." As carefully as he could, he folded the jacket in half and tossed it on the folded-up woolly plaid blanket on the floor, and it landed just perfectly so that no part of it was dragging the ground. Then he scooted closer to Heero, so that they were standing toe-to-toe, and Heero had to look him in the eye to avoid being rude. Duo's face slowly took on a deliciously sneaky glaze soon after. "The way I see it, there's two major things we've gotta work on. Well...three, if you count Jeffrhyss and Relena and all that crud. One is finding a place to live, and the other one...is us."
This was not new. Every time Duo started using the word 'us', Heero knew what he meant, and he got a strange, tugging, tingling sensation right in his belly. He wasn't certain whether he was supposed to enjoy it, but it felt oddly pleasant. He returned the sultry look Duo gave him, to an extent. "Flip a coin to see what gets fixed first?"
"Oh no," Duo warned, slipping away to shut the heavy wooden door to the cold room. For what he had in mind, he wanted no witnesses. "We've been using lack of accommodations as an excuse for way too long."
"Excuse for what?" Heero asked artlessly.
Duo stopped halfway between the door and Heero, shifting his weight to one leg and arching an eyebrow. "I didn't wanna say anything before, but this whole 'innocent' act? It's getting kinda old."
The tingly tugging around Heero's bellybutton grew stronger, and out of a need to just move around to see if it would go away on its own, he stepped away from the wall and crossed the room to the table, studying it. The table was stained a bright yellowy pine colour, and was heavily glazed, even after so many years in storage. What little light came through the tiny window bounced off its surface brilliantly. He smirked slightly, without realizing that he was turning the tiniest bit red. "Is there any way I can talk myself out of this?"
"Not after you've been talking yourself around in a circle for the last year," Duo countered, walking right up to Heero and trapping him against the table. Heero turned around, and there were suddenly two lithe arms on either side of him, propping Duo up as he leaned into him, while he leaned back into the table. "You know all this stuff about seduction, and then you act like an amateur when I want to get close...you looked through that big black book with me and then pretend you don't know what my weirdest dreams really mean when I tell them to you..." As Heero propped his own arms up on the table, his were on the outside while Duo's were on the inside, and Duo curled himself right around Heero's waist and leaned heavily into him, smiling coyly. "C'mon. I'm not buying it anymore."
Heero finally identified the tingly tugging. It was an invisible rope tied around his waist at one end, and tied around Duo at the other, and some celestial force pulled the rope tighter and tighter the longer they stood so close. He had missed his mouse terribly, but like any other one of the strange feelings he had learned to feel, those not associated with his default programming, he didn't know how to say it. It was so much easier to wrap his arms around him and bury his nose into Duo's warm, cinnamon-scented neck, so he did. Duo exhaled after a long pause and wriggled contentedly in Heero's grasp, moving just to feel the arms around him a little better. He never felt like they were truly alone anymore, not at the pub with so many people coming and going who might have their ears to the door, but this was different. Nobody would ever think to look for them there, not ever. Suddenly confident, he pulled one hand off the table and used it to tip Heero's chin up and off his shoulder, coaxing him into a kiss. Falling into the comfortably familiar, Heero let his eyes flutter closed and was blissfully unrattled, until Duo's free hand travelled down his neck to work on the buttons of his waistcoat. Then the hand crawled back up and started fumbling with his shirt buttons, all the while hiding under the blanket of distraction provided by the kiss. When the hand got to Heero's belt buckle, however, he made a small noise and pulled away, breaking the kiss. New territory was often a bit daunting.
Duo was the picture of understanding, and rubbed noses with Heero before leaning back far enough to look at him properly. While Heero had never been able to vocalize what the problem was with taking the next logical step in their relationship, Duo knew how he felt regardless. "Look...if it makes it any easier for you, why don't you think of me as...that plum-and-cherry upside-down cake I made before. Remember that? How you weren't too sure about it because I put yogurt in the batter?"
Heero laughed lightly at the memory. Every once in awhile, Duo came up with something unusual for dessert and used anyone he could find as guinea pigs. "I remember."
"But it turned out to be pretty good, once you got used to it," said Duo, running his fingers teasingly back and forth just inside the waistband of Heero's trousers. "So, all I'm suggesting is...think of me as that cake. Have a taste now, just to try it, then wrap it up and put it on the shelf for awhile, and if you decide you want more...well...you know where to find me."
Gradually, as he thought it over, Heero leaned away from the table, and Duo let him go, wanting him to have as much space and time as he needed to make his decision. Heero turned slightly away to think for a moment, and a surprising sentiment popped out of his mouth. "You're so lucky."
Duo laughed in a kidding way, running a hand through his bangs. "Yeah, but I won't have my looks forever..."
"I mean your freedom," Heero added, running his thumbnail down a groove in the table's woodgrain. "You got to choose your sexual identity...instead of being slapped with one before you were old enough to know whether you wanted it or not."
Duo shrugged. "I didn't exactly pick it either, it picked me." Then he crept up behind Heero and rested his chin on the boy's left shoulder. "You wanna know when it started?"
Heero's eyes lit up with curiosity, and he turned his head a little towards him. "When?"
"Remember when you told me to measure every room in the house, and I kept getting in your way on purpose?" Duo asked in a quiet, smiling voice. With one hand, he reached up and squeezed Heero's arm, then massaged it a little as the memory was fleshed out in his mind. "And then I started whispering in your ear, about how badly you needed some excitement in your life...and you shivered, and I could feel it...right then, I knew I had to get closer to you, I just didn't know how."
Heero remembered that day, but remembered it differently, through a shameful lens that took in the whole picture of their relationship at the time. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but back then, he used to hit Duo, often. And pull his braid. And call him stupid. And tell him to shut up. And after all that, Duo reached out to him, and had been reaching out ever since. He deserved better than to be pushed aside yet again. He deserved a lot better. As he turned around, Duo slid his hand from the arm to inside Heero's shirt and around his back, as Heero leaned close and tapped their foreheads together. "No one else has ever understood me the way you do."
Duo slipped the other hand underneath Heero's shirt and held both hands flat against his back, absorbing the warmth of the roughened skin underneath. They were both looking as far downward as they could without their eyes actually being closed, and were guided closer together by touch and smell alone. "Just a little slice...and save the rest for later."
Their lips drew nearer, so that they shared the same breath. "Now?" Heero whispered.
Duo nodded faintly. "Right now."
A few seconds into the kiss that followed, Heero turned Duo around so his back was to the table, and pushed him on top of it, swivelling him so that he could stretch out fully across the lacquered wood surface. Heero leapt up onto the table after him, pressing him down as their arms and legs tangled together into a messy knot. The kiss intensified as they tried to devour more and more of each other in a single stroke. One of Heero's hands broke free and mimicked Duo's earlier action, fiddling with the buttons of his white chef's tunic, while Duo laced his fingers together behind Heero's lower back and pulled down as hard as he could. Soon they began writhing together in an effortless, synchronous rhythm, and Duo involuntarily lifted a hand up to land on the back of Heero's head and ruffle his silky black hair, as his partner's warm kiss moved down to his neck. Apart from the searing, dizzying physical contact that Duo craved so desperately, there was a growing pressure of anticipation pulsing around them, blotting out all sights and sounds except those hovering an inch off their skin.
Then after awhile, they slowed down, and Heero found himself unsure about his role again. He had partially unbuttoned Duo's tunic, but he didn't know precisely where to go from there. He had an impulse to pull his braid up from where it was dangling off the edge of the table and unravel it, so he could finally satisfy his curiosity about how it would feel to sink both hands into those wavy chocolate locks, but he couldn't decide. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked Duo's heaving form up and down fully before looking him in the eyes. "What comes next?"
Duo glanced from side to side, thinking, as his rapid breathing gradually slowed. His hands were firmly fixed on Heero's upper arms, but his fingers twitched from deep thought. Finally, he inhaled strongly and patted Heero on the shoulder. "Lemmie get the book."
Without hesitation, Heero sat back on his heels and let Duo out from underneath him, and the chef re-buttoned his buttons and ran out of the room. He was no mere boy, but a bullet, as he sped through the dingy underground hallways back to the kitchen, to retrieve the item he had hidden there weeks before. Ignoring the busy scenery around him as the red-haired menace was already preparing dinner, he went straight to the bookcase. Since nobody else ever touched the contents of that particular bookcase, being traditionally full of cookbooks, Duo thought it was the safest place to store the big black book of evil until he felt comfortable taking it to Heero's room at the pub without making it seem like a demand notice. He would have kept it in the cold room, but the rising damp problem was a threat to the ever-so-delicate pages, and he couldn't risk it. On the bookshelf, there was no way on Earth that anyone could discover his filthy, wonderful little secret.
Duo couldn't find the book. It wasn't on the exact shelf where he left it, so he checked the one above and the one below. Then he checked left and right. Then he crouched down on the floor and looked under the shelf. Slowly, he got up, dusted off his hands, and with a glare that could have knocked a budgie off its perch at twenty paces, he turned to face Merlyn, who was just ferrying a tray of canapés to the table for garnishing with parsley. She looked up at him, and was honestly shocked at the anger in his gaze. Duo was motionless except for the furiously twitching of his left pinky finger. "What have you done?"
"Good gracious, you're in a mood today!" Merlyn crooned.
"What did you do to this bookshelf!?" Duo hollered, flinging a hand out to point at the ravaged wall unit.
"Oh, that!" Merlyn rearranged herself, flipping her hair over her shoulder and clasping her hands together in a matronly way. "I've noticed an awful lot of superfluous material on that shelf, like soppy romance novels, and dusty old mysteries, and even a few about the French revolution, but just because the previous staff had a sloppy system of organizing their things doesn't mean I have to live with it now. You may not realize this, but I have a very delicate constitution that can be adversely affected by my environment, and I do like things to be just so. Last Thursday I went through the whole thing, chucking everything that wasn't a cookbook into a box, and I've sent the box into storage."
Duo paled. "You.....you...did what!?"
"I made the kitchen more efficient! Isn't that jolly?" Merlyn's shining smile returned, and Duo just wanted to scrape it off her face with a spatula and toss it to the horses.
"Did you...actually look at the books you were throwing out!?" Duo wasn't sure what a heart attack felt like, but he was probably getting close.
"Good Lord, no," Merlyn laughed. "I just pulled out anything that didn't give off culinary vibrations and out it went!"
Dizzy, Duo collapsed into a chair, his head swimming. He sat there muttering something incomprehensible under his breath for awhile, but then remembered his house guest, and figured he would just have to go back empty-handed. He stood up and was about to flee via the pantry when Bertram Augustus came marching down the stairs and blocked his path. "Where are you going?" he asked in his snide, nasal tone.
Duo swallowed and pointed over the man's shoulder. "I've just gotta--"
"It is nearly five o'clock. Your place is here, working. Back to your position."
"But--"
The butler's hand went for his little leather book, and Duo backed away quickly, grovelling off to the washbasin where a stack of potatoes were waiting to be peeled. The man practically stood over his shoulder all throughout the preparation of dinner, tipped off by scattered reports from the other staff members that the chef had been missing from the kitchen an awful lot lately. Over and over, Duo searched for a hole in the butler's defences, wide enough for him to slip through to tell Heero what had happened, but the man did everything but tie him to the table with his sock garters. The minutes ticked by like a year and a half each, but there was no escape. Duo was a prisoner in his own kingdom.
**********Heero waited...and waited.....and waited. Duo never came back, and the air outside was getting cool as evening set in. There were some very tantalizing smells drifting in from the kitchen, but even though he was ravenous with hunger, he didn't dare poke his head out of the cold room to beg for a morsel.
That wasn't the most disappointing part, though. In spite of all his play-acting at purity to delay something he couldn't completely define anyway, he felt unsatisfied, and hungry in a way he hadn't felt before. Something was definitely about to happen between himself and Duo, and the interruption left him cold and empty, like he was missing something vital to his survival. In the lonely hours he spent in the cold room waiting for his mouse to come back, he thought to himself that even if he had lingering doubts about seeking his sexual self with anyone, he didn't trust anybody in the world as much as he trusted Duo. He told himself that it was time to stop playing games, and after he did, he felt quite a bit better about the situation.
Unfortunately, the rumbling of his stomach was getting worse, and memories of Catherine's renovated menu were swirling in front of his eyes as he stared at the four concrete walls around him. Eventually, he had no option but to reclaim his jacket and climb back out the window, headed for his temporary home. When Duo finally got Bertram Augustus and the others off his back and rushed into the room, he was long gone. Duo slumped miserably. He didn't blame Heero for leaving, but still wished that he could have hung on just a little while longer, long enough to hear the explanation what had happened to the big black book. Now he felt like crying, because they had come so close, and were knocked back yet again.
Then, as he wandered further into the desolate little room, he noticed something on the table. He stepped closer and saw a handful of objects that Heero must have left behind. There were some coins there, just a few farthings and such, not nearly enough for a cab ride but perhaps enough for Duo to treat himself to a small bar of chocolate, to brighten his day. There were also four pieces of salt water taffy wrapped in waxed paper. They must have been a surprise that Heero hadn't sprung on him yet. Duo hopped up and sat on the table, leaning right up against the wall, and picked up the candies, turning them over and over with a grateful smile. He's right...I am lucky.
One of the waxed-papered treasures had something written on it, something that had to be retraced a few times to actually make an inked impression. Duo held the taffy right up to his nose, squinting as he read the tiny message.
"Genki...dashite." ...'Cheer up.' Aww. Duo smiled at the sentiment, then unwrapped the taffy it was clinging to, and ate it. Sweet dreams, pal.
~~~~~~~~~~
Awwww. =^-^= *warm fuzzies* Okay, so, about this Dreamwater-kicking-us-out thing...we've already gotten some very worried emails wondering if this is the end of Bridlewood forever. No it's not! I fully intend to see this story through to the break, and no piddly little server problem is gonna stop me! MWA HA HA HA!! =P But anywho, we will of course post our new address (as soon as we have one) on the main index page, but if you can't get back there for some reason between now and the 4th of May, check my profile at FFN, and the addy will (should) be there. Next episode will be out on May 10th...that should give us a teeny bit of extra time to set up the new site. May 11th at the latest. =P These are desperate times, my friends... *salutes*