Duo woke to the sound of a fan's blades cycling through the air, opened his good eye to see the wood circling, focused on one blade and followed it with his good eye until he began to get a headache. He could hear Heero's muffled voice coming from out in the hall, but couldn't make out any words, just a low kind of rumble. His right eye was still swollen, but better than he remembered it being... there was no throbbing, insistent pain. Duo could see an improvised ice pack to his left, water seeping out of the corners of a zip lock bag and then through layers of paper towels, liquid tendrils spreading out towards him as though reaching.
"Heero..." Duo smiled, knowing that the Japanese boy must have stayed at his side ever since he'd taken Duo from Michael. It was cute, to picture the other worried enough. To imagine that the other cared for him that much.
"Yes?" Heero stepped into the room, softly closing the door behind him with one hand, snapping his cell phone closed with the other. Duo shook his head. "Well, I was talking to Trowa...I didn't mean for you to wake up alone."
"It's okay."
"You might be able to stay with him."
Duo frowned slightly, a little hurt.
"You mean, I can't stay here?"
"No, I just...I wanted to give you the option. And he lives all the way across town. It would be safer."
"I'm not going to let you lock me away in some safehouse, Heero. Not when I've got the best bodyguard right here." Duo was hopeful again, but his emotion fell into a kind of depression. "It isn't like Michael will come after me, anyway. I could be at Wufei's and he'd leave me there. Once you leave, you can never come back."
Heero frowned, getting down on his knees and kneeling beside Duo.
"I don't want to give him the opportunity to touch you ever again." Tentative fingers went to Duo's collarbone, and Duo realized that he didn't have a shirt on and that Heero had bandaged his ribs. Heero's long fingers circled around a purple bruise that had blossomed in the hollow of his shoulder. "He almost broke you."
Heero looked up from Duo's chest, into the other's eyes, and smiled softly. It was a small expression, tender and fragile, and it was gone in an instant. Heero stood up, tossing the leaking ice pack to Duo, who caught it before it could splash against his bare arm.
"I'm cooking eggs. How do you like yours?"
oOoOoOoOoOo
Duo walked down the stairs, humming to himself. It was quite a journey for him—he hadn't known that he was quite so tired, and that surprised him. He had always known just how far he could push himself, and yet, here he was, completely at a loss as to how much longer he would be able to stand. Of course, that might have been less to do with his bruises and more to do with the fact that he was wearing Heero's clothes, but either way, the uncertainty was still there. He walked into the kitchen, breathing a sigh of relief when he rested his weight on the doorframe.
"Hey..I borrowed some of your clothes...that's okay, right?" For all that they were best friends, Heero was still sometimes a mystery, and Duo didn't know how the Japanese boy would react to Duo literally getting in his pants. Heero looked up from the frying pan, studied Duo for a moment, then nodded, returning his attention back to the eggs.
"It's fine." Duo smiled at this, then shifted his weight. "You can go sit on the couch. I'll bring it to you."
"Oh...thanks, Heero."
"You're welcome."
Duo sat down so that he was perfectly centered in the middle of the couch, and for a few minutes, he simply sat still, uncomfortable. He hadn't really ever been to Heero's house...at least not for more than a few minutes. The other always decided that they should go somewhere, or Duo would insist on the same, pulling Heero along. While he was thinking about it, Duo realized that he had never really seen Heero's parents, either. He knew that Heero was eighteen, and therefore legally an adult, but so was WuFei, and he still lived with his family.
Duo frowned at the blank screen of the television, scrutinizing his reflection. Everything was reduced to grays and blacks, but the contrast of his bruises against his skin was still remarkable. He watched Heero bringing out two plates of food, and took the one offered to him without looking away from the empty box.
"Thanks, Heero." Duo shoveled his eggs into his mouth in his characteristic way, practically inhaling them in spite of his physical condition. "You know, for the eggs, the clothes, and...uhm...everything." He smiled, moving his index finger over the china plate to catch the extra salt before sticking it in the mouth.
Heero nodded, having barely touched his own eggs. Sunny side up, with hard-cooked yolks...Duo marveled that Heero could make something so runny and gooey into something that was dry enough that it had to be taken with water. Like a pill. Like a necessity. There seemed a tightness between them, like the strings of a guitar tuned too tightly...as if a single stroke would cause metal to snap back and bruise them both. Heero was looking at Duo, studying him, with some kind of hopeless expression on his own face.
"Duo...why'd you let him?"
He hadn't expected a question like that. One that made him stand up to his motto. I run, I hide, but I never lie. Funny, he'd been lying a lot, recently. Duo looked down at his empty plate. Empty plate, empty promise.
"I...I guess...I kind of...I deserved it." Duo nodded, standing up, something in him screaming that he was a liar, liar, pants on fire, but it wasn't a lie, damn it, because he didn't know why. Why climb the tallest mountain? Why write a book? Why ever do anything or why let anything happen? Because it's there, because he could, because it was easier. There, that was it. He deserved it because he let it happen. He let it happen because it was easier than doing something.
He felt such self-loathing at the revelation, at that discovery that he was that lazy, so low as to allow himself to be pushed even farther down.
"Excuse me for a moment." Spoken through clenched teeth, and he was walking to the kitchen, rinsing a plate he had already gone over once with his fingers. It was a routine. He let the hot water scald his fingers, and everything was far too hot. Hot, like fire that burned like acid that was made of blood that covered and cleaned and eradicated the infection that was himself. And when Duo opened his eyes, he was facing the cabinet under the kitchen sink and he was crying. He could see Heero's reflection in the stainless steel, how the other boy's hand touched the doorframe, like he'd been about to come in, but had stopped.
"You didn't deserve that. You're too perfect to deserve that."
"Hah. I'm lazy, Heero. I'm lazy and it was so god damned easy to sit there and just fucking take it." Duo wasn't angry at Heero. He was angry at himself, and the idea of perfection within himself...how ridiculous. He wasn't a goldfish pond. He wasn't a mirror, or a diamond, and he certainly wasn't an angel. Angel of death, maybe...but that didn't bring perfection to mind.
"Duo." Heero was kneeling next to him...How did he move so silently? His hands were on Duo's cheeks, making him look at the other. Heero pressed their heads together, foreheads touching, noses brushing, eye to eye exactly. And Heero smiled that soft smile Duo seemed to remember from just before their first kiss. But there were no lips suddenly pressed to his, just a simple lack of motion. "This is a very hard place to get to. A lazy man could never find it." And then he took Duo's hand and pulled the other up, still smiling. Duo thought that maybe, if Heero kept holding that expression, his face might crack.
"I'm...going to go lie down, I think."
"Okay. Quatre said that he would come over later with WuFei and Trowa."
"Roger that."
oOoOoOoOoOo
"Heero, you did the right thing." WuFei nodded solemnly, placing a hand on the other's shoulder. Heero nodded in return. That tension still lingered, and everyone seemed to feel it.
"Is he okay?" Quatre was nervously tapping his foot against the coffee table, holding a glass of water in his hands. "Is it okay to go in and see him?"
"It isn't a hospital, Quatre." Trowa opened the door to Heero's room, nudging the blond boy forward. Duo rested on the bed, bangs falling in his eyes like a curtain. Brown against purple against white, and he looked like a broken doll. The leaking ice pack was still on the floor, and a puddle had spread around it. Quatre sidestepped it on his way to the bedside table, where he put the water down with a soft sound it is only possible to make if one is attempting to be very quiet. Duo didn't move, and Quatre sighed, afraid to disturb him. Heero bent down, shaking Duo gently.
"Duo, wake up. We're all here." Duo's good eye came slowly open, and he immediately plastered a grin on his face when he caught sight of Wufei's tight-lipped expression.
"If I didn't know any better, Wufei, I'd say you liked to see me bruised up." A laugh, and Duo put a hand to his bound ribs as he sat up.
"We'll kill that bastard." The Chinese boy, usually somewhat more reserved, actually growled it out. He felt responsible. After all, he had never stopped Michael, even though he had always known.
"No. Don't worry about it, really. I'm okay." Duo shrugged. "See? Now, if I couldn't sit up, there'd be a problem for you to worry about. After all, which one of you lucky goons would get to spoonfeed me?"
Wufei's concern seemed to melt a little. "You're an idiot."
"Not just any idiot, Wufei." Trowa cracked a smile. "The genuine article." The lanky teen was sitting in Heero's desk chair, lounged back with his foot on the cushion. Quatre still looked worried, despite the jokes, and played with the corner of the sheet while he sat beside Duo.
"Well, what're we all sitting around here for, anyway? Let's go do something! I mean, it IS Sunday...aren't there old people to throw water balloons at or something? A movie to go to? A pizza joint that we should immediately run off to so as to eat it out of house and home? I know Heero can't afford to keep me up much longer. I mean, he fed me breakfast, but I wasn't hungry then...now, I'm...I'm...voracious!
oOoOoOoOoOo
Quatre watched in transfixed horror as Duo shoveled pizza into his mouth. All of it. Wasn't Duo supposed to be hurt? And yet, there he sat, somehow finding room to both stuff pizza in and still speak. It was like a miracle, only much more disgusting. Not to say that Duo was a messy eater. No, far from it. To let even a teaspoon of sauce somehow not manage to get into his mouth would be a travesty. But to just consider the sheer volume of his stomach– it would make even the winner of the international hotdog eating contest cringe.
Heero, Wufei , and Trowa didn't seem to mind Duo at all, and their conversation only stopped when Duo's shoveling got in the way of their hands reaching for a slice. Quatre had almost lost his appetite when Duo stopped, looked up at him, and then offered him a slice.
"Uh. Sure?" As though afraid that accepting would get him bitten. Duo merely gave him the last piece of the large pepperoni-sausage-bacon-ham-green pepper-you-know-what-why-don't-we-make-it-an-everything pizza and then went back to his own slice. He obviously wasn't hungry anymore, since his speed was reduced to that of the average hungry human being. "You eat really, really fast."
Heero raised an eyebrow in an incredulous way.
"It took you this long to notice?"
Trowa laughed under his breath, and Duo stopped pulling at his cheese long enough to shoot a glare at Heero.
"Is it my fault you didn't feed me?"
"I gave you enough protein to last someone your size a whole day."
"Yeah, well, I guess you miscalculated, math-boy." Duo stuck his tongue out.
"Six eggs."
"What?"
"You ate six eggs this morning. Six. The recommended serving is only two."
"I coulda told you that wasn't enough." Duo shrugged, even though he'd been full. He could have eaten more.
"How are you so little?" Quatre poked at Duo's side, felt Duo tense, and then quickly pulled his hands up into the air. "I'm sorry! I forgot! Did it hurt?"
Duo waved Quatre off, grinning and trying to breathe slowly. "I'm fine." Heero moved over to sit beside him, gingerly pulling up his shirt to inspect the gauze and tape he'd wrapped around Duo's ribs. "Hey, it's a good thing I'm in the corner, hmm? Otherwise all the patrons'd get to see you feeling me u..hssss." Heero pulled on the gauze with one hand, his other resting firmly on Duo's stomach. "Does it really have to be tighter?" Duo's voice sounded choked, so Heero loosened the bandages.
"Don't move so much." He frowned, looking at the mess that Duo's skin was. "You're bleeding from a cut on your side. I should reapply the bandages."
"In public?" Duo was gripping the table, and after all the poking, felt about ready to throw up all the wonderful pizza.
"I'll take you home." Heero pulled Duo's shirt back down, his fingers quite intentionally ghosting over Duo's chest. The brunette hissed again.
"Does it hurt a lot?" Quatre was worried again, while Wufei and Trowa tried hard not to laugh.
"Oh, you know...just the first time." Trowa's smirk intensified when Duo shot him a glare identical to the one he'd shot Heero before.
oOoOoOoOoOo
"If you didn't wiggle so much, you wouldn't tear the scabs apart, and you wouldn't bleed." Heero was leaning across Duo's bare stomach to get to the drawer in the bedside table. Duo was trying not to enjoy the fact that Heero's hand was on his chest again.
"Yeah."
"You sound like you can't breathe. Are you okay?" Heero pulled back with gauze and tape in hand.
"..yeah." Duo breathed in as deeply as he could, then exhaled slowly, just to prove he was alright. Heero then began poking Duo, running his hands all over the other's chest and stomach.
"Does this hurt?"
"No."
"This?"
"No."
"This?"
"No!"
"This?"
"Nngh..." Duo moaned when Heero got to his hip, the other boy's fingers sliding over the curve of the bone slowly.
"Should I take that as a 'no'?" Heero grinned. Duo flushed bright red, propping himself up on his elbows.
"I–You...You did that on purpose!"
"You're having problems breathing again...your voice is uneven."
"Who made you a doctor, you damn ha–" Duo stopped short by Heero's lips pressed hard against his own, the other's tongue running over his teeth and the roof of his mouth so slowly. Heero's hands were in his hair, and for a moment, Duo just sat completely still. Then he sat up all the way and flipped Heero on his back, climbing on top of the other.
"Don't hurt yourself." Heero cautioned as he grabbed Duo's chin, pulling the other down to him. Duo's hands went to Heero's shoulders, and he pulled himself even closer than he had intended. It hurt, and the angles of Heero's body dug into still-livid bruises, but the taste of Heero was worth a thousand times the amount of pain he was feeling. Duo slid his hands along Heero's sides, resting them on his hips, then pulled back from the other's lips. They were wet, and a crushed roses color.
"Was that supposed to be CPR?"