Thank you to everyone for reviewing AND for not giving up on me! I may be slow, but I promise to eventually finish.
Disclaimer: Don't own or profit. (From now on I'm just typing "DOOP.")
Warnings: The usual cussing, but nothing too bad this time around.
CONTROL FREAK X
It was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining from behind a few lazily drifting clouds. The impeccably manicured lawn was sparkling with dew fresh from the sprinklers. The roses were perfectly pruned, the tablecloths at the outdoor café all perfectly straight, and the nets all hung perfectly evenly on the tennis courts. A small group of attractive, well-toned young men milled around a newly repaved track, all engaged in various stretches. It was a scene straight out of a magazine and Heero would have given anything not to have been in it. He inwardly sulked even as he half-heartedly did a few lunges. It was far too early to be thinking, let alone exercising.
A weak toot of a whistle brought a muscular man clad entirely in white to the boys' attention. He clapped his hands sharply and hollered.
"Alright, you lackluster excuses for civilized chaps; it's time to warm up. Get moving!"
Heero reluctantly began jogging around the track as his tennis instructor shouted pseudo-insulting remarks at his students. He felt as if he was moving in slow motion. Normally he welcomed the chance to run off the frustrations of the day. Today, however, he would have happily parked his rear on the bench and festered for the lesson's duration. He was in a simply lovely mood and forced physical activity just wasn't how he wanted to spend his Saturday morning.
He hadn't even wanted to take tennis lessons to begin with. They were, like darn near everything else in his life, his parents' idea. He'd only complied because they'd threatened to take away his kick-boxing classes if he hadn't. Or rather, his mother had, claiming that all respectable young men could play tennis.
Like she was one to talk about respectability.
"You're rather glum today," Quatre noted, jogging steadily alongside him. That was the sole perk to the lessons; it guaranteed him a couple of hours a week with his friend, who suffered from a similar overdose of familial involvement. In his case, however, it stemmed from his myriad older sisters rather than meddling parents. Heero was fairly sure that he would have gone insane long ago if he were in Quatre's position, but his friend seemed to take it all in stride. The blonde was almost scarily well-adjusted.
Heero snorted. His bad mood would have been blatantly obvious to a half-blind dingo, never mind his empathetic friend. "It's nothing major, Quatre," he assured the blonde. "Just a little trouble at home. As usual," he added in an undertone.
"I thought your mother pretty much ignored you when your father was away," Quatre pried, not realizing he was.
"Not always," Heero said shortly, decided he'd rather not explain the situation. After all, he couldn't be positive he wasn't mistaken and he didn't want to needlessly slander his mother. Maybe they were… going over tax forms or maybe… his mother had needed advice about what anniversary present to buy for his father.
Or maybe he was completely deluding himself.
"Oh," came the response. Then, after a pause, "Well, you know you're always welcome at my house. My sisters just love you and I'm fairly certain that we're on your mother's list of socially acceptable friends."
Heero snorted again. "You damn near ARE the list." He jogged a few more steps before adding, "But, thanks, Quatre."
"No problem," he smiled. "I know you'd do the same for me."
Heero laughed as best he could while running. It came out sounding rather hiccupy. "And we both know I'll never need to."
"Less talking, more running, gentlemen! Stop acting like you're at a country club!" the instructor bellowed, interrupting their rare moment of male bonding.
"We ARE at a country club," Heero mumbled, but he stopped talking anyway. Sometimes breaking the rules did nothing but leave you short of breath.
Duo sniffled. Stupid freezer with its stupid carcasses with their stupid temperature requirements. Why did they have to freeze them, anyway? People ate unrefridgerated meat for meat for thousands of years and it never killed anyone! Well, okay, it DID, but that wasn't his point. His point was that HE was currently being killed by REFRIDGERATED meat. Okay, maybe he wasn't DYING, but if people could be killed by spoiled beef then surely someone somewhere had once died of a cold. They might have been sickly, old and feeble, but still! They had died and that was all that counted. Case closed.
He sniffled again. He wasn't too sure he was thinking straight, but since he seldom did, he wasn't too concerned. He heaved another carcass onto the processing belt just in time to sneeze.
The day was turning out just peachy.
He wondered what time it was. He'd been unable to find his watch that morning and suspected Trowa had confiscated it for his own use, as he so often did. It wasn't that his roommate needed to know the time; oh, no! He was far too suave for that. Trowa just liked the way it looked. He claimed it made him look more responsible and less like the type of person who would persistently show up late to meetings/appointments/jobs/etc. when that was, naturally, just the type of person he was. Duo had sat waiting outside various restaurants and movie theaters often enough to know that much.
It drove Duo crazy not to know the time, especially when he was at work. He'd be damned if he was going to stay trapped in the meat locker for one minute longer than he absolutely had to. There conveniently weren't any clocks hanging on the walls and if he asked Brawny Man the time too often, he would take his life into his hands. Never anger the man with the axe. That was a personal rule of his.
He trudged back over to the racks of cow flanks. Each row was assigned a letter and, with typical morbid hilarity, he'd given each row a name such that would be appropriate for a milk cow. A was for Annabelle, B was for Bessie, C for Candy, D for Daisy and so on and so forth. He was currently busy transporting Winona over to the processing belt so that her various members could be DISmembered. Oh, but he cracked himself up.
He sneezed again, and wondered if someone was thinking about him. If so, it was probably his boss, wondering why he was taking so long to load up the next hank of beef and possibly plotting his untimely demise. Death by lumberjack. Such would be his luck.
He wondered what normal high school students did on Saturdays. Probably slept. Oh, but it would be good to sleep past seven in the morning for once in his life. It had been years since he'd enjoyed that particular luxury. He knew paperboys who slept later than he did.
He stopped himself before he could angst too much. There was no use in wasting valuable energy making himself miserable. Work provided enough wretchedness without him adding to it. He should devote his mental energy to more positive pursuits, like thinking about nice, soft beds or happy, LIVING cows, or his friends Heero and Trowa.
Trowa. That bastard. He was probably still draped across the couch, becoming one with the cushions, as was his weekend ritual. He claimed he had to keep up with the Saturday morning cartoons, lest he fall out of the loop and not know what Lizzie McGuire was up to. Why Trowa wanted to know was another story, but he did not fathom to comprehend even the shadows of his roommate's logic. There was just no understanding someone whose favorite snack food was Milk Bones.
As for Heero… he was probably lying in a king sized bed with silk sheets while his personal maid hand-fed him caviar from a silver spoon and read him the latest stock quotes or something similarly obnoxious and hoity-toity.
But, that wasn't fair to Heero. The kid was trying his best to detract attention from his financial assets. He was certainly more down to earth than most people he knew, himself possibly included. It was just frustrating. While it was nice that Heero was insisting his money wasn't important, it was also irritating as frick because he was insisting his money wasn't important. If anyone knew the importance of money, it was someone without any and Duo fit into that category pretty nicely.
While he knew exactly why Heero was doing it, and he really appreciated the effort, he wished the other boy could just be honest about it. Yes, he had a lot of money. No, he didn't really care for it. But, did he realize what it could do for him? Did he appreciate it? Did he understand where he would be without it? If so, did he really want to be in that situation? Duo doubted it and from that doubt stemmed his frustration.
He kicked aside a few random chunks of something and stepped around a frozen puddle of… drippings. He could not wait to get home and shower. He just wasn't in the mood to be working. Not that he normally was, but today was even worse than usual. He could blame it on his cold all he wanted, but Duo knew the truth.
He resented having to be at work because he'd finally found someplace he'd rather be.
Trowa knocked assertively on the cheap plywood door, briefly admiring the way Duo's wristwatch looked as it peeked out from beneath his sleeve. He peered at its face as twenty seconds ticked off and, when the door did not open, he frowned and knocked harder for another eight, exactly. He tried to time it so that he hit the door four times a second at perfectly even intervals. Such things were important. Finally, after he had rapped thirty-two times, he heard a response.
"Alright, alright! I'm coming!" a voice bellowed from the depths of the apartment.
Wufei sounded rather disgruntled, Trowa noticed. Perhaps his diet was lacking in fiber. He made a mental note to bring over some bran muffins when he got the chance.
"This had better be important!"
The door threw itself open seemingly on its own to reveal a rather miffed Wufei. He had obviously been interrupted during his shower. His hair was loose and dripping rivulets of water down his face and onto his hastily-thrown-on t-shirt. Already the shoulders were soaked.
"Hello, Wufei," Trowa said coolly, moving past him and into the apartment without waiting for permission. "Are you aware that your shirt is on inside out and backwards?"
Wufei sighed and shut the door. "Hello, Trowa. I take it Duo is at work?"
"However did you know?" The lanky boy threw himself down onto his neighbor's plush carpet, nuzzling the soft fibers with his cheek.
Wufei tried to keep his eye from twitching and instead occupied himself with putting his shirt to rights. "You only come over when you need someone to bother and you only need someone to bother when Duo isn't around. Since it's a weekend, logic dictates that he must therefore be at work." He disappeared towards the bathroom.
Trowa rolled into a sitting position, wrapping his arms around his legs and propping his chin on his upraised knees. "My, my. Such masterful wielding of logic. But, tell me, Wufei, can your logic answer the age old question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Trowa raised his eyebrows intimidatingly, watching intently as the Chinese boy emerged from the bathroom.
"Six," he responded promptly, aggressively toweling his hair.
"And pray tell how you arrived at that conclusion." Trowa rolled backwards, rocking back and forth several times before releasing his knees and lying flat.
"Logically speaking, angels do not exist. Therefore, since we are dealing with fantastical creatures that are outside the bounds of logic, the answer can be whatever I wish. Six is my favorite number and therefore is the answer I choose to give to your question." Wufei draped the towel across his shoulders and sat down on the sofa, taking up a book of crosswords and opening it to a marked page.
"Is that a new book?" Trowa asked quickly, his interest piqued. He quickly came to a proper sitting position, leaning forward intently.
"Yes," Wufei responded, twirling a pencil between his fingers.
"What kind of puzzles are those?"
"New York Times," Wufei said shortly, seemingly already engrossed in the puzzle.
"Can I help?" Trowa crawled forward and rested his elbows on the couch, right next to Wufei's knees.
"If you must."
Trowa rapidly climbed on the couch, craning his neck to read the clues over Wufei's shoulder. "You started without me" he accused.
"I do have a life outside of your visits."
"If you're call doing crosswords a life, you're an even bigger dork than I thought," Trowa taunted. "And sixty-three across is 'sassy.'"
"As if I'd listen to someone whose hobby is memorizing lyrics to defunct television shows."
"The 'Super Chicken' theme song is more than worthy of reintroduction into popular culture," Trowa said calmly. "Six down is 'annex.'"
"You're an annex," Wufei mumbled, but not until he'd filled the clue in.
End part 10
A/N: No Heero-Duo interaction this time around, but there was a nifty Trowa scene in there. And, hey! Wufei!
I am kind of being mean to Trowa. He's been reduced to a literary device. sobs I am so sorry, Trowa!
Anywho, I hope you enjoyed this chapter. There should be another in the not-at-all-distant future!
P.S. I was wondering if anyone pictured this as happening in any particular city/location. In my head, it's kind of a strange conglomeration of Boston, my hometown, and my college town. What's everyone else thinking?