Rating- PG-13
Warnings- innuendo, language, insomnia, and occasional pearls of Duo's wisdom.
Even more thanks to my beta, who has lavished compliments on me like there was no tomorrow hugs Sintari You should check her out. She's pretty damned cool.
There's a possibility that I'll turn this into a series of the five pilots, and their different dealings with bouts of insomnia. R&R is welcome.
It's strange to me that every time we meet it's not for your benefit, but for mine. I don't learn anything about you, not even your name. I just tell my story, open myself up to you, and never ask anything in return. Honestly, there ware times when I feel like post-war Jesus, the second coming of a death-centric pilot/Christ. Then I remember that I'm just a boy, seventeen years old, whose only crimes are those of passion and those of omission. My name, in case you were wondering, is Duo Maxwell. If you want to make things easier on yourself, that's fine. Forget my name; call me 'Bob' or 'Jim' or 'Superfly.' I would definitely dig it if you felt the intrinsic need to call me 'Superfly.' At any rate, my hobbies include taking things apart, fixing things, watching movies, making cookies, playing Tetris, and unrequited love.My favorite song changes with just about every movie, but a long-standing adoration of mine is the Tetris theme. It's the only song that can get honestly super-glue stuck in my head for days on end. I find that to be an admirable trait/feat for anything. Two more interesting facts about myself, and then I'll digress and start/finish telling you my story of the day (and I personally think it's pretty damned cool and would be greatly joyed if you felt like reading it.) First, I'm gay. Two years in closed quarters with mostly male companionship will really bring out the homosexual in you (I really don't know why I'm telling you all of this.) Second, I'm a chronic insomniac. Now, this little trait came in handy during the war, when in all fairness I wasn't supposed to sleep anyway. My life= saving the colonies. It's a pretty cool set-up when there's a war going on, but afterwards being able to pilot Deathscythe and play a drum cadence on a Styrofoam cup with coffee stirring sticks (two points for insomnia) are not exactly marketable job skills. Tough luck to anyone who's never been in one place long enough to get a documented, formal education.
Insomnia, round one: Duo vs. Tetris (ding, ding.) My fingers pulsed against the arrow keys as I began yet another game. The little colored block contorted themselves, according to my whims, into fitting together. I yawn and crack the knuckles on my opposite hand. Dammit. I have to work in about a dozen of those little green pieces that are designed to fit in approximately two places on your grid. There should be some kind of limit as to how many of these you can have at a time. I make a quick glance at the clock between pieces. Digital red numbers glared at me, saying,
"Dude. It's three-sixteen in the morning. Why the fuck are you still awake?"
I don't know.
"Just go to sleep."
Fuck you. Jesus Christ, I'm talking to a clock. In my mind. I yawn again. I seriously need to get way more sleep. Do I? Nosireebob. Score! Yellow thingy! I love those things; they fit everywhere. It drops into place and I feel a confident thud as two of my lines disappear. Much as I'd like to revel in my victory, I have to make room for a hot pink 'L.'
"What the hell are you doing?" It's that damned clock again.
"Shut up," I reply, actually speaking to nothing.
"Hn." I frown. Clocks do not say 'hn.' I turn my head back. Damn. It's my roommate, the ever-lovable Heero Yuy.
"Sorry, dude," I answer, turning back to the screen. "I thought you were the clock."
"What?"
I pause and think about what the hell it was that I just said. Double damn. "Nothing. What're you doing up, Hee-chan?" Oh, by the way: remember that little 'unrequited love' hobby? Heero is the center of it. Yeah, I know. The center of my romantic universe says 'Hn' and sounds like a clock. I sure can pick 'em, ne? Don't answer that. It was rhetorical, I swear.
"Eh," he replied. I could hear his light footsteps moving towards me. Heero's not exactly a sparkling conversationalist. Amazingly, I'm most cognizant when I have my subconscious set on Tetris; it prevents me from thinking about my unhealthy obsession with Heero while I'm talking to him, which is handy because it prevents such Freudian slips as 'nice ass' and 'father my children.'
"Couldn't sleep?"
"Pretty much. You?"
Shit. I lost. That's the only flaw of Tetris: you can't win. No one can 'beat' Tetris; they can only beat themselves.The reason I like it so much is probably because it seems like some kind of allegory for the futility of my own existence. That or the music and the colored blocks; I'm not really particular. With a combination sigh/yawn, I lean back in the computer chair. "I'm always up this late."
"Playing Tetris?" he mused, pulling up one of the hard wooden chairs beside mine (I have the pimpin-est chair in the 'hood. I don't even care that 'pimpin-est' isn't actually a word.)
"Or downloading bestial porn," I answer offhand, trying to throw him off. "Whichever suits my fancy." Then I remember that Heero still has a good bit of his 'Perfect Soldier' war persona going on. He refuses to be thrown off by anything. Even at three-thirty in the morning, he is perfectly calm, collected, and sentient. Lucky bastard.
He pointed at the screen. "You lost."
Ouch. Paper cut lemon juice = the state of Duo/Superfly's (choose your own name) ego. "Yeah. I know. I hate this game."
"So, this is what you do with your time?" Both of us appear to glow in the dark from the warmth of the computer monitor. I smiled at him, my eyes alight with love and sleeplessness (I'm pretty sure he only registered the latter.)
"Yup."
"Mind if I try?"
I slid out of the chair, smirking at him. "Does the Perfect Soldier play games now?" I taunted. He sat down, his eyes glazed with computed focus, a result of Dr. J (which, one would think, would make this boy absolute shit in bed. I don't have enough background to attest or deny this.) Still, he never let down his rapier wit.
"I'd prefer to think of it as tactical training reinforcement." I snickered from behind him. "It's just these arrow keys, right?"
"Yup," I answered as he clicked 'Play Again.' As an excuse to touch him, I put my fingers over his on the arrows. "Up flips the pieces, right and left move it accordingly, and down accelerates it."
"Hn. Mission accepted." Ever the military man, even when there was nothing to do with it. I watched him. At first I was only looking at him, the bed head muss of his dark chocolate mocha hair and the intensity of Prussian blue eyes. The computer's glow reflected against their glossy shine, and all I really wanted was to put my hand on his thigh. Honest. I don't know why. I wasn't looking anywhere near his thigh, yet snaking my fingers around what I knew would be cool, soft skin, maybe with just a bit brushing the flannel of his boxers, was just damned appealing. He had no idea I was looking at him. Tetris has that kind of effect on newbies. I glanced at the screen, and realized how long I must have been watching him. He was up to level nine, with the pieces moving at an insane rate. His fingers were fast; I knew that in the event that he and I started to make out and grope around like savage animals, he would have talented hands.
"Damn," I muttered, shocked an awed.
"What?" Heero questioned, his voice sounding distracted for the first time in all of the time I'd known him.
"You're doing great man!" I replied, slapping him across the shoulders in what I hoped was a casual manner.
"Thanks."
Well, this was a Kodak moment. Heero and I actually appeared to be bonding (two more points for insomnia.) Ugh. Damned bladder. Looks like I've gotta cut this one short. "Be right back, dude. Call of nature." He didn't answer, but I knew he'd hear me and was simply entranced. I went down the hall to the bathroom, following the well-treaded path in the darkness. And no, I did not go and masturbate.
Don't even try and hide it. I know that's what you were thinking.
When I came back, the first thing I saw was Heero sprawled across the computer chair, totally naked with his legs spread wide. He'd casually cast his lacking clothing aside, and his Prussian eyes were inundated with deep, insatiable, carnal lust.
Not really.
He was still playing Tetris, up to level gazillion and twelve, or something else equally ridiculous. What you just experienced was the product of Duo's insomnia-mirage. Don't feel bad I thought the same thing. At least you didn't start talking to a clock. "Still going, dude?"
"Hai." Damned Japanese. He managed to make me feel stupid every time he spoke it. And, there's nothing attractive about the language. You could be threatening painful, quasi-apocalyptic decimation or ethnic cleansing and still sound like a nine-year-old girl playing hopscotch.
"Cool. I didn't know you played."
"I don't," he answered brusquely. He wanted this conversation to be over, but I personally didn't give a shit. I knew that I had a lot of time waiting ahead of me before I would trail off to sleep, if I did at all tonight.
"Then why are you so good?"
He shrugged. Of course he didn't know why. Heero Yuy was basically the master of the universe; he was good at everything (sans conversation and emotion) and no one really understood why, especially not him. There was something intrinsically gifted about every part of Heero (I stumbled in on him once in the shower, and believe me this is no exaggeration.) That's probably why my admiration for him has reached such astronomical levels and spreads into so many realms of my being. Or maybe, I'm just a horn dog and Heero's a hottie. Either way, I'm not complaining; it doesn't totally suck no matter how you slice it.
"I'm going to bed, Duo," he said, pausing the game. "Don't stay up too late, okay?" How very matronly of his master-ness.
"Hai," I mimicked. He smirked at me like he might kill me before he got up and left. I promptly lost because Heero was god, and I a mere Jesus. I sighed heavily. I knew that I wouldn't fall asleep, but after my encounter (not to mention the sleepless mirage) I didn't feel like playing Tetris anymore. I wandered online, checked my e-mail: spam, spam, Wufei, spam, forward from Quatre, and more (you guessed it!) spam. I sighed and yawned at the same time again; that noise was really starting to freak me out.
You know how a lot of those times there's one of those happy endings where everything's in a neat little package tied up with string? You really feel fulfilled after one of those. Nothing is left unresolved; no loose ends to knot back into place.
Well, as long as you're here, you can kiss that shit goodbye.
Because we all know things don't work out like that. I don't want to lead people on like that and make them think that sometime their lives will end up like that, perfect and beautiful, because they won't. And sometimes, I think that we all know that somewhere deep inside. It's the kind of knowledge we wish we didn't have, though; we miss the ignorance the way we miss oxygen. We hold it dear. Sometimes, we have to force ourselves to get real. Ignorance is bliss, but it leads to pain when reality hits you like a freight train. So, we pull our heads out of our asses, and got back into real time.
And in real time, unrequited love happens. It's just kind of the way things go.