Title: Little Conversations

Author: Hawk Clowd

Disclaimer: As always, I own nothing and I want nothing. I think these boys would cost me too much money in condoms and lubricant, quite frankly, if they didn't run me dry from with the beer and cigarette runs.

Blood Type: NyQuil

Warnings: sleep-deprived insanity.

Part: Two

Author's Notes: Right now I am seriously pissed off at a certain someone in an rp I'm in... So I'm posting this to keep myself from pulling a Joan and punching the wall. I'd tell you about this guy and what he did, but I won't. Because I'm trying to pretend I'm a nice person and keep myself from fucking initiating a nuclear explosion. Be glad.

---

There were three very long cracks in the ceiling. Tatsuha bashed his head backward into the wall once again and wondered how long they had been there. Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Tatsuha made a mental note to ask Eiri, who had shared this bedroom with him once upon a time, after he was done pestering his brother about his current crisis.

"This isn't hard, Tatsuha," Eiri told his younger brother irritably. "It's just some simple math. You can't possibly be having this much trouble."

Tatsuha glanced down at his open math book and the clutter of scrap paper he had been scribbling on and scowled. "Well, I'm sorry we can't all be super-geniuses like you," he snapped.

Eiri ignored that. "If you hadn't procrastinated and started your homework at the very last minute," he pointed out in a low growl, "I would be in bed right now. You stupid, stupid idiot."

Grr. "First off, I didn't procrastinate. I forgot. Second... Well, are you going to keep telling me how stupid I am or are you going to help with my homework like I asked you to?" Tatsuha asked. He fought to keep his voice down to a low hiss; his father was still sleeping, after all, and the old fart still didn't know about Tatsuha's cell phone... If the geezer found out now, Tatsuha would not only have his phone taken away but he'd never get his math homework finished, either!

Tatsuha had, at first, considered saving himself the aggravation and turning the homework late, but he'd already done that a lot lately and his grade was suffering enough without him turning assignments in late. And so, in his desperation, he had called Eiri. Really, that had been a stupid thing to do. Eiri had just finished his latest manuscript and had been planning to spend a full twenty-four hours sleeping off his weeklong all-nighter binges. Tatsuha had interrupted his brother at hour five. And so now Eiri was tired, cranky, and helping Tatsuha figure out his math homework.

There was a catch. There had to be a catch.

"We've been going over this for three hours now," Eiri complained, "and there are only so many ways to tell you how to apply the quadratic equation!"

Tatsuha shot a look at his alarm clock. "It's only three o'clock!" he hissed. "You've only been talking to me for two and a half hours now, Aniki!"

"My point remains." There was a clatter from Eiri's end and the elder brother cursed.

"What was that?" Tatsuha asked, alarmed. His math homework was temporarily forgotten.

"I dropped a pot," Eiri muttered.

The fucker was cooking?! He was cooking while he tried to help Tatsuha with the math homework! Tatsuha fumed. It wasn't fair. Why was Eiri the smart one? Had he garnered up a shit load of good karma in a former life or something? Tatsuha scowled at his math book and at the sounds of Eiri cooking. They were taunting him. And the fact that his father was going to be waking up in another few hours to start his daily chanting was not helping at all. This wasn't fair.

Eiri was talking again. "Look, you know the formula. I know you know the formula -- it's in your fucking book. X is equal to negative b plus or minus the square root of b-squared minus four times a times c, all over two times a. It's not that hard. You figure out which number is a and which number is b and, if you're lucky, which number is c and then you go from there!"

"I know that," Tatsuha retorted.

Someone mumbled something on Eiri's end of the phone and Tatsuha sighed. Figures. Eiri's pot had woken up Shuichi or something and now Tatsuha was never ever going to figure out his math homework! Eiri mumbled something about helping Tatsuha with his homework and Tatsuha could hear Shuichi arguing with him about how much he needed to sleep. Grr. Tatsuha made a mental note to make a Shuichi voodoo doll.

The conversation continued for a moment before Eiri turned back to the phone. "You hear that?"

"Yeah. Tell Shuichi to go fuck himself," Tatsuha replied.

Eiri passed the message along and then turned back to the phone, his amusement clear in his voice. "What were we saying?"

"Quadratic formula," Tatsuha said.

"Right." Eiri made a yawning noise and Tatsuha could hear him banging around in the kitchen. The fucker was starting to make him hungry! "Okay... so if you know all that, what's wrong?"

Argh, homework. "It all makes sense in my head," Tatsuha said, "but I can't make it work out on paper."

Eiri sighed. "It would just be easier to show you..."

"So what? Are you going to drive all the way here, show me how to do it, and drive back all before school starts without Dad ever figuring it out?"

"Fuck no."

"So...?"

"You're on your own."

"ANIKI!" Once he had made that exclamation, Tatsuha clapped a hand over his mouth and stared at the door, listening carefully for sounds that would signal that he had woken up his father and that the old geezer was coming to eat his brains. Once he was certain that his father hadn't woken up, he hissed back into the phone. "Aniki, you've got to help me. I'm already close to flunking and..."

Eiri sighed. "I'm tired. I'm sore. And I want to go to sleep. So I am going to do this once -- just once -- and it will never happen again. Tell me the question and I'll give you the answer."

Tatsuha repeated it, number by number, being very careful of all the signs and brackets and everything. When he was done, Eiri was quiet, and that was unsettling. Tatsuha squirmed and stared down at his paper.

"Aniki...?"

"You are such a fucking idiot."

"Eh?"

Eiri growled. "The reason you can't get this problem is because it doesn't require the quadratic formula. It's fucking addition. You son of a bitch. You woke me up for this?"

"Oh."

"That's it?" Eiri asked. "Just 'oh'? There had better be fucking more than an 'oh' here."

Tatsuha frowned and stared back down at his problems. "Um... Well, I'm having problems with the next one, too..."

Eiri hung up the phone and so Tatsuha gave it a few minutes before he hit redial and called his older brother back.