Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Rituals ❯ Part 5 ( Chapter 6 )

Standard disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or any of the characters appearing in the show. They belong to Sunrise, Bandai etc. The plot in this story that has nothing to do with the GW timeline, however, is mine. Deal with it.

Warnings/Genres: Heero POV, slight angst, 1+2-hints, OOC, tiny lil bit o' action. . .

Authors Notes:

1) This chapter is probably the most boring yet ;_; , but it'll hopefully happen more in the next one.

2) I've watched both the Japanese and the American Gundam Wing episodes and since I like the Japanese voices better, imagine the guys talking in those. Not very important for the fic, just thought I'd let you know. ~_^

3) There are things in this chapter that probably isn't technically possible, mostly because I didn't want to try it, but think of this as the future. They have invented gundams; why not develop other things as well?

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Rituals - Part 5 by Maaya

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It did eventually stop raining, allowing me to go outside and fetch my laptop from 'Wing's cockpit even before my clothes were completely dry. I left Duo, asleep in his bed; curled up into such a small ball he was completely hidden under the old covers the safe house had been supplied with. When the clothes were finally dry, he had disappeared on a shopping trip with Quatre.

I asked myself how exactly Wufei wanted him to 'prove' himself and decided he wasn't doing a very great job so far, especially since he had been bedridden for most of the day.

Though, no matter how he acted afterwards, Duo had done well on the battlefield. He's not a strategist, that one thing was clear for he was too. . . 'wild', not seeing the whole picture and probably not caring all that much anyway. But still, good. Maybe the most talented among us, but not necessarily the best.

I am better.

I'm not saying that to boast about it, why would I? I'm saying it because it's true.

Duo might be better than Quatre and Wufei, maybe even Trowa but he's not better than me. It's a fact. I have been trained too long to not know it all, techniques, battle-strategies, weapon-knowledge, by heart.

Wufei is an aggravated fighter without mercy. He wants to kill or be killed.

I typed on the small, black laptop-keys without pausing for even the slightest second, staring at the screen in hope of coming up with the code to use.

Then the screen got black.

I tell you no lie, the computer shut off completely, the screen got black and the blower stopped working, filling the room with silence I hadn't been aware had been missing.

Feeling vaguely dumbfounded and happy that no one had seen me blink at the empty screen, I reached out to try if it worked to turn it on again, and yes, it did.

The internet connection however, didn't work. I had connected my laptop through the old wall socket and it had worked, unsurprisingly, so as we probably wouldn't be sent anywhere we couldn't be easily contacted.

But now it didn't work anymore. That didn't feel like a good sign.

But as Internet apparently didn't work for the time being, I couldn't see any reason for staying in front of the computer, so instead I went downstairs, wondering how to fix the telephone lines.

Quatre and Duo were talking in the kitchen; I could hear their voices; Quatre's almost feminine one and Duo's much deeper, all way from the stairs. From the sound of it, I guessed they were newly arrived from their trip and when I stepped into the kitchen, it became confirmed.

There were bags, and a backpack placed on the table, seemingly filled with various food supplies and such. No first aid kits, though, or anything else or that sort. Quatre, who was proceeding to put things away in sundry cupboards, caught my stare and seemed to understand the underlying question in it.

"We decided that the kits in our gundams would be enough for the time being. Food is more important right now." He said with an apologetic smile, like if he excused himself for something he didn't feel guilty for. Then he turned away and continued to fill the refrigerator with milk and juice.

It was . . . strange to watch them work because it seemed so - so . . . usual for them. Too normal for me to ever have seen it before.

Duo looked up at me just as I had fully stepped into the kitchen, still watching him and Quatre.

"Hey, Heero? D'you know how to cook?" He asked and I would be lying if I said the question didn't surprise me. I thought for a while, going through old memories, until finally deciding on a suitable answer.

I shrugged.

Cooking hadn't been something J had added to his list of what I needed to know.

"Then," he paused long enough to pick up a large book out from a bag, "we're gonna have to study this." He let it fall heavily onto the table, allowing me to read its title. When I had, I looked up again.

"A . . . cookbook?"

He grinned. "That's right. Now." He nodded towards the book. "Read."

I looked at him, blankly.

He looked back.

Did you know that his eyes don't fit very well together with that grin? They don't laugh as much as his mouth - and his brows are always just pointing faintly too much down towards his nose. Like if he would be annoyed or very, very concentrated.

In all, that grin and those eyes in the same face make him look devilish. Mischievous. Maybe even maniac.

I frowned and broke our eye contact. He looked almost . . . dazed.

"Yeah, you don't *have* to." He muttered and it took me a while to realize that he meant reading the book. "Just don't use that glare on me."

I shrugged.

It took us quite a while to fix a somewhat decent meal, though 'decent' can vary a lot depending on the eater's view. Looking back on it, I admit we were disastrous. Facts like that butter or cooking oil needed to be added to spaghetti or that you don't need quite 'that' much cheese to add were unknown to us during that time.

I studied the guys' way of eating carefully and decided that Quatre and Wufei were definitely from rich families, or at least from upper middleclass. Their way of eating was decisively correct, straight back, small mouthfuls, closed mouth while chewing . . . and so on. Though of course, I did the same thing, just not with the same air of . . . correctness. I don't think I have an air of anything.

Trowa ate more like me, carefully, methodically, making sure no kind of poison infected the spaghetti.

Duo ate with an air of . . . hungriness. I don't know how to describe it else than that. He moved his fork and knife neither without pausing nor to talk. It was strange to see him so quiet. But then again - strange was probably the best way of describing the last couple of days altogether.

After dinner, or if you should call it lunch, both Quatre and Duo seemed to brighten up, however. They began to talk about various, unnecessary things and laughed. It was like their words sneaked through Trowa's, mine, and Wufei's bodies on their way towards each other.

"We forgot to buy something." Quatre suddenly said in a different - more serious voice that made us all look up at him quickly. Duo burst out laughing.

"You look like," He snickered, not noticing how out of place his amusement was as everybody looked at him in questioning silence. "Like dogs suddenly hearing food falling into their dog bowls. I could see how your ears turned toward Quatre together with the rest of your heads . . . Heerotriever . . ." And with that, he burst out laughing again, sides heaving up and down swiftly until he controlled himself. We ignored him.

"What, Quatre?" Trowa did pointedly not look at the braided boy.

The other boy hesitated. "Well . . . washing-up liquid . . . we need to do dishes too."

It felt slightly annoying how little we knew about this kind of things.

"Maybe soap will do?" Was Duo's suggestion. "It can't matter 'that' much, can it? Heero, you'll help me?"

I blinked, first surprised, then annoyed, seizing him with a glare. "I'll do the dishes. You'll dry."

His face changed fairly quickly, from doubting to surprised, from surprised to shocked, from shocked to indignant, and from indignant to another one of his impish grins. When he wears that grin, I have to keep remind myself that he is a gundam pilot. It's so easy to forget sometimes . . .

So I ended up doing the dishes, with Duo beside me to take whatever I was finished with, dry it and then put it away somewhere. We used soap - maybe it wasn't the best thing because it was harder to clean away than washing-up liquid but it worked well enough for us anyway.

The lukewarm water was slippery against my hands but felt, in a way, also good. Relaxing. At least until my fingers started to prune.

More than once, I looked up and caught him looking at me. When it happened, I glared until he looked away again but I got tired of it after a while.

"What?" I grunted out into the silence, causing him to jump. His braid fell into a puddle of lathery water on the dish-bench, making the tip wet and lathery from soap. But he didn't seem to notice.

"It's --" He hesitated but only for a short second. "-- strange to see you do that." His nod towards my hands holding a clean plate indicated that he meant the washing up.

I looked him over. "And you look strange doing that."

He did. Wearing black pants and a black shirt, ruffled after having gotten wet and dried again, didn't quite fit with the red and white cloth he used to dry off a fork. He started and looked at me - I think I surprised him by really answering him.

"I think we have reached an agreement." He let the fork fall into an open drawer under the dish-bench. Then, unexpectedly. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen." Came my immediate answer and I waited.

"Fifteen. I think." He looked at me, expectantly.

I fulfilled his wait. "Why do you wear black?"

He looked . . .'flat'. Yes, that's the word. Flat. "I guess I'm used to it."

I opened my mouth to answer my own question, modifying it to fit my needs and spandex. "I wear practical clothes."

He didn't seem surprised, just shrugged with a lopsided, slightly melancholic grin. I think he uses his grins to show his emotions. He has a sad grin, a devilish, a happy, a twisted one . . . the list can go on and on like pi.

And now he subdued, wearing a grin and fluffy soap-suds on his cheek. I'm not sure how he manages to get it there in the first place since he was the one to dry the dishes, away from water and soap. But he looked ridiculous with it. And oddly . . . pleasurable.

It annoyed me.

My fingers itched to dry it away so I dipped them underwater again and found another plate to clean to keep them occupied. "You have lather on your cheek."

"Oh." His face did a funny little change from thoughtful to sheepishly surprised, doing a somewhat failed attempt to reclaim his cool. "Yeah." And dried it away.

My fingers stopped itching and I dared to hand him the plate.

We didn't say anything for a long while and sometime in the heavy silence I suddenly heard a weak sound, akin to the one coming when you hung up a phone in a house. I was satisfied knowing that the telephone lines worked and that I didn't need to go out and find it myself, especially since it had started raining again.

Duo perked up at the sound. "What was that?"

I handed him a knife to dry. "The telephone lines."

"They've been out?"

"Yes." I confirmed. "Duo?"

"Yeah?"

I think I let out a soft puff of air that could be qualified as a sigh. "You have lather in your face again."

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TBC

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I'm planning on about eleven chapters in this story, I think, and something's gonna happen soon . . .

*wanders away to watch 'Rocky Horror Picture Show'.*

*sings* "I'm a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania . . . "