title: the gift
author: newtypeshadow
fandom: Sky High
pairing: Will/Warren
disclaimer: Sky High and its settings and cast are not mine.
notes: this is a quadruple drabble--that means 400 words. also, while i completely support the cannon pairings--they're adorable!--a bit of slash just had to be done.Writing exercise: "Warren didn't know what to make of the gift."
Warren didn't know what to make of the gift. It had been sitting inside his window, this tangle of wires, when he arrived in his single dorm from Physics 255. He picked it up off the ledge and studied it, experimentally burning the plastic of one wire with a finger. The wire drooped, charred.
He wondered who it was from. He'd been getting strange gifts lately, had them hidden under his bed gathering dust bunnies where no one could see. There was the pane of stained glass; the strange pink stuffed rabbit; the metal bar with a handprint squeezed into it; and now this tangle of wires. At first he thought they were from his dad, on parole under his mother's and the Commander's supervision. But when the metal bar came, he thought they might be from Will. After all, how many people did he know who had the strength to make an impression on steel?
Mr. Stronghold took souvenirs, so why not his son? He knew Will had been helping his parents lately, juggling college and crime fighting, like Warren but on a larger scale. The Stronghold Three, they were, as if it weren't obvious to civilians what their real identities were.
But why would Will be leaving these for him? What did it prove—that he was good? Warren knew he was. That he hadn't been forgotten? He could just e-mail. And why didn't he stay to talk, if they were from him? Warren couldn't figure it out.
Sometimes he entertained the thought that Will was leaving them to show off, not to prove he was better—because he wasn't, he was still clueless half the time—but as a way of courting. He understood it was what he'd done with Gwen, but Warren wasn't some girl. What was Will playing at? Was it even him?
A part of him hoped so. It was the part that started flames in his hands and dreamed of the sweep of hair falling over Will's face. The rest of him wasn't so sure what that would mean. He knelt down and slid the wires under his bed, mussing the sheet to cover his growing collection. Then, pulling his hair back into a ponytail, Warren Peace sat down and began his homework.
On the roof of the adjacent building, Will smiled faintly, slid on his blue mask, and took to the skies.