Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Extra Tuition ❯ Part Two ( Chapter 2 )

Author: Ryuen Nakashima

Pairings: past 2x4, I'll leave you to find out about the others

Archived: Not yet. None of my fics have a real home yet *sniff*

Setting: Around eight months after Endless Waltz

Rating: R overall

Warnings: yaoi, angst, language, north-eastern English… that's all for now.

Disclaimer: Nothing GW related is mine. This story is. Nuff said.

Extra Tuition - Part Two

Duo swallowed the lump in his throat as he stood outside the English classroom. `This is *not* gonna be fun,' he thought. `Well, at least I'm here early so I don't make a fuss.' He swung open the door gently to find out just how wrong he'd been.

"Mr. Maxwell, so glad you could join us," the professor said haughtily from the front of the class, staring at him over the top of her glasses and prompting every student in the room to turn and give a similar stare. "I don't expect new students to be more than ten minutes late for class."

He frowned and looked at his watch. "The timetable says nine o'clock," he offered sheepishly, not really wanting to look at anything other than the wall just behind the woman.

"As every student knows, the timetable layout does not accommodate for the 8:45 beginning of our lessons," she continued. "My name, since you didn't care to join us on time, is Professor Frostwick. There is a seat at the front here, Mr. Maxwell. Please take it. Now."

Duo cringed and made his way to the front (wondering if this woman's name could be the most appropriate in the universe), watched by every pair of eyes in the room. All except one, maybe. It also happened to be who he was sitting next to. `Oh no, not him,' he groaned inwardly. `Why do I keep running into this guy?' he wondered as he sat down, pulling out his books and pen.

`Great, the front. Now there's no way I'll be able to cover up how slow I'm working.' He stole a glance to his left before he opened his textbook. `Still avoiding me, huh Quatre?' he asked mentally, watching the little blonde shift uncomfortably and stare pointedly at the blackboard.

His ears pricked up at some random clicks and whirrs from behind him and noticed that some of the students had even brought laptops along to work on. `Now *that* is ridiculously unfair. It's bad enough that my writing goes at a snail's pace but these guys are gonna leave me in the dust. I could work just as well as anybody else on a computer. But I can't afford something like that… This place just gets better and better doesn't it?'

About an hour and thirty minutes later, during which they'd all been working in silence, Professor Frostwick stood menacingly in front of Duo and leant towards him. "Are you struggling, Mr. Maxwell?" she asked in what seemed like the loudest voice he'd ever heard.

"Um, no. Not really," he replied carefully, looking up at the sharp face he'd come to loathe inside an hour, pretty sure that, once again, all eyes were on him.

"It has been an hour and a half, Duo," Frostwick continued patronisingly. "Do you expect me to believe that you've only answered six questions in that time and you aren't just being lazy? Well?"

Duo looked back down to his desk and shrugged. "I'm just a slow writer," he replied quietly. "The questions aren't really the problem… my reading isn't- I'll try and work a little quicker."

The professor stood up straight again. "In any case, the lesson is almost over," she said, increasing her volume as she walked away from him. "Perhaps you would benefit from some home schooling, if you're so slow."

The braided boy winced at the sniggers coming from the back of the class and resigned himself to the fact that he was not going to like Tuesday mornings.

As the bell rang an excruciating fifteen minutes later, Duo eagerly leapt out of his seat and made a dash for the door. He got out of the building altogether and slumped back against the wall, grateful in the extreme for the twenty minute break he had.

He almost didn't dare look at his timetable to remind himself of which lesson he had coming up. `Maybe something bad'll happen like a huge fire and that Frost-witch would just get burned to a crisp. Yeah, if only…' "Oh my god, NO!" he exclaimed to himself as he checked his lesson plan.

"Ugh… French," he thought out loud. `There was a day when anybody who tried to teach me French could've just been stepped on by a few metric tonnes of Gundanium alloy. Man, I miss Deathscythe. It gave me a purpose and a reason for people to be scared like hell of me. How have I fallen this far?'

"Bonjour classe!"

Duo smiled weakly, sat comfortably at the back of the room in a corner, at the woman who could now be speaking in tongue for all he could understand. `Trowa once told me that French isn't all that different to English in places… so where exactly *are* those places?'

He listened in again to try and catch what was being said.

"Je m'appelle Madame Sinclair. Si tu as une probleme dans la lesson, levez-vous votre main."

`It really worries me that everybody seems to understand this woman,' he wondered to himself, finally deciding it wasn't worth the strain and gave up on trying to understand. `Maybe there's a different class I can take instead of this one… no, nope. I am not gonna quit,' he determined, pulling out a piece of paper and his dictionary, starting to write out a letter to the teacher as best he could.

After the two hours of French, which had only just given him time to finish his note and deduce that everybody else in the *entire* class had been studying this language since the age of five, he waited until the other students had left - Quatre, Persephone and Aubrey included - and walked to the front of the class.

"Bonjour, Duo. Ça va?" the French teacher asked in the kindest voice he'd heard all day.

"Um, yeah…" Duo mumbled. "Uh… j'ai une probleme… avec… um… just read this," he settled on, handing her the note and waiting on tenterhooks for some kind of reprimand.

After a moment or two the French teacher laughed softly and then spoke in a perfect English accent. "You know you've written this all in infinitives and jumbled up sentence structure, don't you?" she asked in a playful sort of way.

"I hadn't the slightest clue," Duo said, returning the playful exchange.

"I didn't realise you hadn't touched on the language before, I'm sorry," Madame Sinclair continued. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all. "There is a class for French beginners if you'd prefer to take that instead of struggling here."

`There's that word "struggling" again. I feel like such a dunce…' "Um, is there any way of me staying in this class?" he asked hopefully. "I'm not such a fan of being put in remedial studies."

The teacher shook her head. "Unless your French improves dramatically in the next week, I'm afraid not," she replied. "I'll give you one more lesson but after that you'll have to be put down."

Duo grimaced and left. `You mean I'm not already being "put down"? …jackass.' He walked outside to the simulated summer day and sat down on the same hill again, pulling out his notebook and pen and did some handwriting. Well, it started out as handwriting and ended up as doodling.

"Ooh, what ever *is* that? It looks very complicated!"

"Hi, Persephone," Duo said as the girl appeared unexpectedly beside him on the hill. "Actually it's just circuitry. I memorised it when I was piloting. It's the inside of Deathscythe's cockpit."

The girl put her hand up to her face and shook her head. "Dear me, that's terribly Byzantine. I wouldn't know where to begin," she replied honestly. "You must have quite a brain in that cute little head of yours!"

Duo smiled genuinely for the first time that day. "Thanks, I guess I must have. So what're you doin' around here? Didja lose your friends?" he asked, wondering what she could possibly want with him.

"In fact I didn't," Persephone said. There was something distinctly unnerving about this girl's speech patterns. "I just wanted to tell you that we're having a little get together for the new students tonight and I was told to invite someone I knew and I thought `I know somebody interesting!' and I do hope you'll come along."

"That's nice of ya… but I think I'll have to pass," Duo said, noting the fact that she hadn't said `somebody nice' or `somebody I like' but somebody *interesting* and that was never good. "I've got studying to do."

Persephone pouted. She was obviously used to getting her own way. "Really?" she said in astonishment. "Everybody's going. It'll be awfully quiet around your dormitory rooms with nobody there! But, gosh, I can't force you to go." She got to her feet and smiled. "I hope you'll at least think about it, Dio. I will see you later, I believe we have Physics together!"

`Geez, she's exhausting- wait a minute… Physics?' he brightened a little as he picked up on what his next lesson was going to be. `All science. Everything that's written down is in symbol or notation form… and there aren't many people who know Physics better than the Gundam pilots. Maybe it'll be an okay end to Tuesdays.'

"All right. Today I'm assigning lab partners."

Duo was already sobbing mentally at the first statement from Dr. Miller. `Fuck you, you stupid fucking fuck!' he screamed in his mind. There was nothing he could do now but sit and wait for him to be allocated some partner who'd hate him. HHhhhHHHjkliiuoHiuUiguiogguyioHe listened intently to the names being read out. `This thing's rigged,' he decided. All the people that knew each other were being put together.

"Duo Maxwell…" Dr. Miller said as he rifled through his register `Wait… if everybody who knows each other is being put-' "…and Quatre Winner."

The braided boy looked across the room to the little blond with his head in his hands and rolled his eyes. `He *is* embarrassed, that lying little creep.'

Once the other partners had been read out, people began to move around and Quatre stood up and walked to the front of the room. Duo watched carefully as he muttered something to their Physics teacher and was met with a shake of his head. He heard a sigh and braced himself as Quatre gathered his things and sat next to him.

"It's okay, Quatre," Duo said in an overly kind voice. "All your little friends know you didn't *choose* me so they won't have a problem with it. There was no need to try and switch partners."

The blond boy looked at Duo and quickly looked away. "I'm not going to apologise for just doing what I have to do, Duo," Quatre whispered sadly. "But I never meant to hurt you. You mean so much to me… you always did. I had no idea you were going to end up at this school. If I had had any-"

"Quatre… don't. We're not gonna get along here so don't bother with that," Duo replied. "Look, we should just get on with work and try not to kill each other, `kay?"

The Sandrock pilot frowned in an almost hurt way before looking Duo in the eyes again and nodding briefly. "You're right," he said. "So, what's this experiment about anyway? Got a reference sheet?"

Duo nodded and found himself amazed at how easily they could force huge issues to the back of their minds. "G-force effects," he read out as Quatre looked across. "Wow, not many people know more about that than us, huh?"

Quatre smiled and laughed a little but stopped abruptly as he felt Duo's pain. After a few more minutes, they were working quietly away as if they were no more than strangers until they worked their way into a rather unfortunate conversation.

"Look, all I'm saying is that I'm not surprised that you're struggling here, Duo," Quatre said after a part of the conversation Duo couldn't really remember. But his ears certainly pricked up at the `s' word again.

He glared slightly and gave Quatre a sideways glance. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked warily, conscious of just how much he might not want to hear the answer.

The little blond hesitated for a moment before sighing. "This is just a tough school to get by at for someone with such limited education as you've had," he replied. "You're just not at the same standard as the other students, that's all. There's no need to get upset about it."

Duo felt his blood boil and he calmed himself as he picked up one of the metal blocks. "You're certainly baring your fangs today, aren't you?" he snapped just about inaudibly. "The one person I thought I could count on not to make my life hell. I'd expect this kind of thing from Wufei or even Trowa-"

"Stop that!" Quatre snapped back at an equally inaudible level. "Just because you're angry at your own stupidity doesn't mean you can drag *him* into this mean-spirited world in your head!"

`Mean-sp- ME!?' "Alright," Duo said calmly, slamming the metal block back down on the wooden bench. "You can finish this thing without me but lemme set one thing straight," he quieted himself again as he noticed people starting to look. "I am *not* stupid. Not having gone to school has *nothing* to do with my intelligence and I'm surprised somebody as "bright" as you can't figure that out."

He sat back down and folded his arms across the desk, sensing that Quatre was on the verge of tears but scarcely able, in his current state of mind, to care.

Duo willed the end of his first Physics lesson onwards until the two hours had passed and he could finally get back to his dorms. The bell went and he made just as hasty an exit as he had from English earlier that day.

`Wow, Persephone wasn't kidding,' Duo thought to himself as he sat alone in his room that night. It was deathly silent throughout the halls - apparently everybody really *had* gone to whatever party it was.

He sat on his bed and abandoned his notebook again, having flicked back to his circuit doodle and Persephone's voice telling him he was intelligent. It was better than letting Quatre's malice ring in his mind.

Duo could hardly believe just how `mean-spirited' - to paraphrase - that Quatre could be. Then again, it could possibly have been Duo's fault in the first place. He really should have known better than to mention Trowa to him but it had just slipped out. He'd seen what that man could do to Quatre's mental state, even when he hadn't been in the same stratosphere.

"He deserved it," Duo mumbled to no one. He looked across at the bed on the other side of the room, wondering why he felt so lonely. `I was on my own plenty during the war and it didn't bother me. Okay, so it bothered me a little after I met Heero. I got too used to his company but that's not what's buggin' me now.'

Duo put it down to the way in which he'd been shut out by his fellow schoolmates. Quatre's spitefulness probably bothered him more than anything. It had certainly put an end to the way he used to fantasise about that one night he'd had with him when they'd met.

HHHHThe braided boy gulped and blinked vigorously. April 30th. That one time with Quatre had been the only night he'd ever been completely willing to get into bed with another man. His past occupation as a catamite on L2 was hardly something he wanted to think about but every time anything sexual popped up into his life, he was forced to confront it all over again.

It was part of the reason he couldn't fight back too harshly against Quatre. The way his friend was now in a position to use information like that terrified him. He could only imagine what hell he would endure if people found out about that. Quatre and Heero had been the only two he'd ever dared to confide in and now he was down to just one that he could trust.

Duo looked up at the ceiling. "Where the hell are you, Heero?" he whispered.

TBC…