For: Adult content, alcohol-y goodness, profanity, violence, etc.
Pairings: 1X2
Disclaimer: I really shouldn't have to say this more than once. This doesn't belong to me. I am not special. ::tear::
A/N: Yeah... sorry I didn't update, I fell out of a tree. No, seriously. Anyway, this is angsty. This whole damned fic is angsty, but this chapter doesn't help. For those who don't know, Dr. No is a nifty James Bond movie from the way-back-when days when Sean Connery was James Bond (freakin sweet.) R&R.
Chapter Nine- Dr. No Strikes AgainLela had gotten to the point where she could navigate the apartment's kitchen with an expert grace. Even Heero was beginning to rival her skills of direction, considering the limited (see also: nonexistent) training she'd had. At the moment, Julian sat in his carrier; shaking the rattle that Heero had bought him, while Lela wandered around, glancing through cabinets, and asking Kolya questions.
"You like Ramen?"
"Ramen?" he replied inquisitively, cocking his head to one side. The word sounded strange and foreign on his tongue, and it was clear that he'd never heard it before in his life.
"Ramen... umm..." Lela squinted one eye closed, trying to process an accurate way to describe Ramen noodles (knowing that nectar of the gods wouldn't do.) "It's like... these noodles, with flavor powder..." Kolya wrinkled his nose slightly at the concept of eating powder. "No... it dissolves into the water as you cook the noodles... and ... uh... you kind of eat it like soup, you know?"
"Yeah," Kolya answered, chewing on his lower lip. This made little sense to him, but he wasn't about to argue with this girl, who spoke perfect Russian. It simply amazed him. He knew she couldn't be American; Americans rarely went to the trouble of learning the languages of countries they were in. They'd always had a feeling of superiority because of their freedoms, but never totally realized just how young they were. He felt a need to pry into this girl. "Lela?"
"Hm?" Her response was absentminded as she shuffled through a cabinet.
"Are you Italian?"
"Not really. I've lived there."
"Oh... where are you from, then?"
"America."
He stared at her like she had lobsters crawling out of the various orifices of her body. She stared back at him like he was insane. "What?"
"You're American?"
"Yeah."
"I wouldn't have guessed."
"My grandmother's full Italian. I look a lot like her."
Kolya was going to tell her that he wasn't talking about her appearance. He'd been thinking to himself about how different she seemed from the other people he'd met on the colony. First off, she spoke his language, so he could communicate with her. Une had only known basic phrases, and a translator had made up his file, and then been promptly moved to another case. He understood that. The situation there was crazy right now. He shook his head abruptly, a fan of feathery blond bangs falling over his eyes. He didn't want to think about that; he'd just gotten out, and now he was thinking about the people he'd left back in. He turned his attentions to the beautiful girl before him, heating up a pot of water until it came to a boil. He was about to tell her how beautiful he thought she was, and how much kinder she was than anyone else he'd met and how grateful he was that she spoke Russian.
That was all before Duo came slamming out of the bedroom with his shirt half-on and death in his eyes.
"Duo?" came Lela's voice from the kitchen, as she leaned away from her cooking to get a better handle on what was going on. He ignored her, his bare feet slapping the tile beneath them before he reached into a drawer and groped blindly for a minute. Finally, he found what he was searching for. He stalked back across the living room and out the door without a word. Lela stared after him, not knowing what to do or what to say. Kolya watched behind her, with equal, or perhaps greater, confusion running thick through his eyes. "Hey, Kolya?"
"Yeah?"
"Watch Julian, okay?"
"Yeah. No problem."
With that reassurance, Lela followed Duo's angry trail out into the hallway. There, she saw Duo huddled outside the doorframe, smoking a cigarette and staring with no expression in front of him. She gently let the door slide shut in her hands before coming around in front of Duo and kneeling, her hands on his knees. He didn't really seem to register her presence, but somehow she knew he saw her. "Duo?" He didn't react at his name. "Duo? What's wrong?"
"Don't worry about it, Lela. You have a fucking kid and some Russian to re-learn don't ya, Wonder-fucking-woman?"
"Okay: uncalled for. Just because you've got shit doesn't mean you can take it out on the rest of us. Now, what the hell is your problem?"
"What is my problem?" he questioned back, spitting back the words. It was almost impossible to tell whether Duo was on the brink of laughter or utter tears when he spoke. "My problem is you and your goddamned kid marching your merry ways into my fucking life. My problem is that fucking Russian sitting in my kitchen and acting like this is the fucking Brave New World. My problem is that Heero won't even fucking look at me like he gives a shit anymore, and I'm really sick and goddamned motherfucking tired of being the only one who gives a flying fuck anymore. That is my fucking problem, Lela. Satisfied?"
Lela had no idea what to say. Duo angrily drove the butt of his cigarette into the hallway, creating a deep brown burn on the green paint. Then, he began to fumble for the pack in his back pocket. Lela reached behind him and put one hand on top of his. Her green eyes caught his in her gaze, and she held him there against her. "This..." she began, the boldness in her voice attempting to overcome the cracking feeling that she felt in her throat. "This is about Heero, isn't it?"
"No..." he sighed, letting his head flop down, chin to his chest. "This is about me being a fuck-ass."
Lela's fingers slid underneath his chin, tipping it up. She saw the liquid tears that filled his eyes, and couldn't help but wonder just how many people had seen Duo Maxwell cry. "Always look up," she whispered softly, repeating Duo's own words as their own inside joke. For a moment, there was a flicker of a tacit understanding between the two; to Duo, that it was okay for him to cry, to Lela that she needed to do for him what he'd done for her.
In one instant, Duo realized he couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't handle everything here, trying to keep up his job without them thinking he was an alcoholic, helping Lela raise Julian, and attempting to maintain a relationship that had been floundering for months with a stone wall of a man who wanted nothing to do with him. He bowed his head against Lela's shoulder, and let his arms lock around her waist. His weight forced her backwards off of the balls of her feet, and her tailbone hit the ground hard. She ignored the sting of pain, even as Duo's forceful embrace threatened to swallow her whole. Instead, she reciprocated, gripping her wrists behind Duo's shoulders and forcing herself on them, which pushed Duo back towards the wall. Then, she felt his fingers, clinging for her shirt, and a slimy wetness seeping into her soft skin. Her hand glided to the thin line of Duo's spine, where she could feel the shudder of his lungs as he tried to breathe and sob at the same time. She felt overwhelmed with sympathy, and let her fingers instinctively slide up to his neck and twist around the tiny wisps of hair at its nape, as Duo poured his soul into her.
"Fuckin' A..." Duo whispered.
Lela agreed.
A pair of green eyes snapped open abruptly. It was dark all around, and the whole room had a suspect cold feeling. Lela frowned in spite of herself, and glanced at the clock. The green neon numbers told her it was 3:37 in the morning. Why was she awake? Then, she felt it. A low, grumbling in her stomach. She sighed. Now that she got to eat regularly, her stomach kept her up. She had a tendency to not eat enough to satisfy her through the whole night. She pushed back the sheets, already slightly irritated at herself and her insane metabolism. Suddenly, her eyes shot down. There was a thin beam of light shining underneath her door. She was on alert then, though she didn't know why. Heero must have been rubbing off on her. Still, her curiosity and hunger overpowered any inhibition she would have had, and she slowly left the room.
As she padded into the kitchen, the first thing that greeted her, albeit the brilliant light, was a harsh, sterile smell. It smelled like a hospital, or a house that was too clean. She frowned, and peered around the tabletop. Duo was there, squatting on the floor with a toothbrush and a bucket. As she got closer to the black figure, she realized that he was scrubbing away at the lotus blossom that he had painted there. She gasped.
"Duo?" He looked up at her. She couldn't describe what she saw in his face. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before. His cheeks were flushed, his lips wet and parted. In his eyes was a watery, flooded feeling, which soon turned to a sort of joy, as he answered Lela in his standard jovial tone.
"Hey, Lela. You're up at strange hours." He leaned back onto the balls of his feet and dibbed the toothbrush back into the bucket. "You're just like that crazy Russian. He went off to the library or something. I think he wants to learn English. What're you doing up?"
"I was... hungry. What... what are you doing, Duo?"
"Oh... I'm just scraping off this stuff."
"Are you gonna paint over it?"
"I wasn't planning to."
She took a few moments to take all of this in. Duo didn't want the art on the floor anymore. Duo wasn't going to paint anymore. Duo. Duo didn't want to paint, didn't want to keep the bright colors on the tiles and linoleum, the only thing that made their apartment truly beautiful. Something was wrong, something she couldn't determine, only detect, like a faint, stinking odor. It was bitter and harsh against her senses. She leaned down, closer to the bucket. It was foaming slightly and filled with mostly clear liquid.
"Why?"
Duo shook out the toothbrush and turned his head back down onto the floor, focusing on erasing the last hints of that lotus blossom so that Lela couldn't see the hurt in his eyes. "I dunno. Sometimes... you grow up, Lela. You learn things. I've learned that doing this doesn't help anything."
She frowned. "I thought... I thought it helped you."
"You thought wrong." He hadn't meant for it to sound as sardonic as it had, but now that he returned his mind to the comment, he felt guilty. He wanted to look up at her, but he couldn't bring himself to let her see him cry again. Instead, he worked the soft bristles in harder. "I mean... it's kind of like artists don't get any respect in their time." He dipped the brush in again and then continued to scour the floor. "All the people that historians call 'the greats,' the archaic like Picasso, and Matisse, even fucking Van Gogh... they didn't get any recognition. I've already gotten my recognition, and don't know why I should try and take it away from geniuses like them."
"I didn't know you were trying to compete with ancient masters. I thought you just did it because it was beautiful."
"It's not that beautiful." He wanted to shrug her off. The flower was almost gone now, and that made him feel better. He just didn't want Lela to understand why.
"I loved it." Her voice was sad as she spoke, her eyes falling on the walls. She wondered how long it would be before he changed those too.
"Well, it's not about you!" he snapped. "It's not about what you think, how beautiful you thought it was. I don't want it. I don't want this shit around and they're my goddamned paintings. Why shouldn't it be my decision?"
"I just... I want to know why."
Duo rose to his feet, surprisingly quickly considering the length of time he'd been squatting there. "Well, you know what, Lela? You don't always get to know why. People don't always get to know everything or understand everything. You don't understand why Victor died."
"Victor died in the war. Heero shot him, because of sleep deprivation and decimation."
"But why did it have to be him? Why does it have to be any of us?" Duo folded his arms around his shoulders. "Why do we have death and angst and pain? What does it prove?"
"All sunshine and no rain bring only a desert."
"Oh shut up. You're the one who's always telling me not to be all quasi-Buddhist and shit. Take your own fucking advice for once."
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Nothing that isn't always wrong with me. I'm not a fucking ray of sunshine, precious. I can't make all your problems go away, so stop bugging me about it."
"Duo, why can't you just talk about what's going on?"
"Because I don't want to fucking talk to you!" he screamed, kicking the bucket with one foot. It toppled over, spilling its contents onto the floor around him, and suddenly the whole room was permeated with a dirt and turpentine stench. "Jesus Christ, take a fucking hint!" He stormed off then, slamming angrily back into his room and shutting the door with a violent thud behind him.
While Lela was mopping up the nasty mess and toking in chlorine fumes, Duo was fumbling in his bathroom drawer. He gripped the unopened bottle of vodka, and unscrewed the silver lid. Quickly, he knocked back a few gulps of the clear ambrosia. It burned against his throat, but nowhere near as much as existing. His lips still tingled as he raised it to his mouth for his next guzzle. He'd missed this.