Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The One-Eared Neko ❯ MALCONTENT AND THE AGREEMENT ( Chapter 4 )

Part 4 MALCONTENT AND THE AGREEMENT

The gate to the carnival ground still swung open, the wooden, red-lettered sign slapping against the tangled mesh as the employees made a steady route back and forth from the large, garishly decorated moving trucks. They carried boxes and packages, pulled exotic animals along on studded leashes, and traveled in friendly cliques, chatting and generally flirting at the man opening the gate for them. A group of belly dancers in average clothes giggled as he held it courteously then went inside once they had returned to mindlessly gossiping among themselves. He rolled his eyes secretly and grunted to himself.

In the daylight, with the sun hovering just behind the metallic tops of the skyscrapers, the carnival was fragile looking and serene. No brash, garish colored lights at the door of every tent, just the strings of barren Christmas lights running overhead. Bits of trash littered the ground; red, green, and blue scraps of ribbon and half-consumed pop bottles skittered in the puffs of wind. Distant sounds of men talking and metal beams and boxes being packed up echoed all around, along with the assorted mewling and growling of the petting zoo being rounded up. Heero cut through the assortments of colorful tents, some being pulled to the ground to the right and left of him. Not too many people cared about his presence, or even saw him go by. He was quiet and unobtrusive naturally in life; it wasn't too much of stretch to be that way intentionally, so he was undisturbed in his journey. After a few minor missteps, he was again at the transient home of the bohemian, the criminal, and the con man, Duo Maxwell.

It seemed strange that he'd given his name so readily when he looked back in hindsight. It was an unusual name and ran him all the more risk of being caught, but no. He must have be better than that to be caught so easily, otherwise he couldn't retain his flashy little tones and bright, devilish expression in his eyes. Somehow he knew a fear-broken Duo wouldn't have that same bold criminal charm around him.

Again, he stood outside the red velvet fabric draped over the doorway, with two bare wires of white lights crossing overhead, fizzled out and dark. From the inside, the fuzzy, indistinct tape music had disappeared and was replaced with the sound of a young man humming. Boxes were pushed around and the sound of a suitcase opening all reached Heero's ears as he lingered outside in the morning sunshine. He didn't wait long, because the bohemian cursed loudly, happy to put a very large emphasis on the more vulgar-sounding syllables. He listened to the gypsy boy mumble something about the damned movers and walk toward the door.

But Heero didn't move.

The red velvet curtain peeled back and the blur of movement paused as soon as it sensed that there was someone standing in the doorway. Duo's face looked blankly into his own for a moment, and then those wonderfully colored eyes went wide in surprise.

He jumped. "Eep! You again!" He slammed the curtain shut as quickly as he could. If a curtain could be slammed.

Instead of either leaving at the prompting of the unwelcoming gesture or barging in with a righteous anger, the college man decided that it would be best to wait a few moments. As he stood there, neither jilted nor provoked, he was happy to listen to the assorted sounds and translate them for the time being. The bohemian first went into the back of his tent and pounded on the top of the suitcase. He could hear the harsh rhythm of curses slowly subside, and the gypsy boy wander back to the front of the tent, where he dropped the suitcase on the ground and clothing shuffled loosely. Lifting his eyebrow, Heero wondered vaguely if he was rummaging through the false bottom for a weapon, but heard no such signs. After a few moments, he gauged it to be safe, as safe as it probably could be when dealing with a criminal, anyway. The Japanese man slowly glanced around and stepped up to the red velvet curtain.

The dim light of the tent took a moment to adjust in his eyes, but the pointed violet glance he received upon stepping inside didn't go unnoticed. Heero stood still and let the red velvet swing close behind him. The brown-haired bohemian, sitting on his haunches across the room while rummaging a hand through his dark clothes, eyed him suspiciously and then turned back to his suitcase. Silence permeated the air.

He was packing up his Romany costume, vest by fringed shirt by studded earring by gold hoop bracelet and all. The slim man didn't make a sound as he padded them down into the jumbled pile of clothing and then produced an anonymous black cap from his side and lifted it toward his head. Eyes down, hair visibly damp around his neck and ears, and ignoring Heero completely, he made it a process to pull the last bandana off his head and quickly slap his baseball hat onto his head and pull the rim down professionally. The bohemian, now dressed in all black, simply stashed that as well in the chaotic mass of clothes. He pressed the lid down and flipped the rusted metallic clasps close with sinister sounding snaps.

Heero stood quietly, turning over what to say in his head.

Again, he was beaten to the punch. The slender black-clad man turned his head and flicked his wrist in a throwing motion, though his eyes still refused to meet with the traveler's. Heero caught the glimpse of light reflecting off the item and caught it neatly. When he unfolded his palm, the face of his watch stared back at him, the golden second hand ticking just as faithfully as ever.

Heero looked back up to the bohemian, and he was looking back. With a very analytical, almost cynical look in his eyes.

"Thank you," Heero managed out of courtesy.

He was met with barbs. "I'm defenseless, you know. This would be a perfect time to capture me, traveler, since you've obviously recognized me for who I am." Duo remained down on his haunches, revealing the very athletic arch of his thighs. "Else you wouldn't be here."

"I came for my watch, that's all." Heero's eyes and tone were quiet.

The con man stood up and gave him a very dark little smile paired with a shake of his head. "That's such bullshit," he declared through his misleading display of pearly white teeth. "I wouldn't believe that load for a second if it came with a freaking diploma." He laughed bitterly and shook his head, while Heero watched from the doorway.

He collected up himself and bent over to pick up the dark suitcase, still with that eerie grin upon his face. While the dark-haired man stood unresponsive in the doorway, he crossed the room and leaned down again, this time lifting up the mattresses of the cot behind a pulled-back curtain. Two semi-automatics were produced and he pocketed both weapons, then went rummaging again, this time fishing out a plain white, flat box from deeper underneath the mattress. Obviously, it was cold hard cash. After being caught bouncing checks, Duo must have gotten smart to the police' awareness of him and wired a withdrawal from some secretive Swiss or Cayman Island bank account.

He finally looked up to Heero, slipping on a neutral little smirk, one that could have meant anything you wanted it to, anything you made it out to be. A mirror smile.

"You know what? I don't care if you do happen to turn me in. So why don't you make your move, big man?"

Heero remained silent and stony, though it was getting harder to keep his mouth shut. He twitched his lips to open his mouth, but hesitated. He wrestled with reason in his mind, and all the while, those violet eyes dissected him from across the room.

"Come on, go ahead."

Nothing happened.

"I don't care," Duo insisted, shouldering a black backpack he picked up from the foot of the bed. "I don't have anything good to do with my life anymore, if you want to know. If it suits your sense of righteousness to bring me in, mister, then go ahead."

When the traveler, in his clean-pressed suit and yuppie tie, didn't respond, it only prompted a darker smile of deceptive brightness.

"No? Fine then. I hope you realize you're letting a criminal out onto the streets," he said in dark humor. He sighed nonchalantly and brushed a lock of brunet hair from his face as he walked up toward the intruder into his secrecy, never breaking eye contact. The gypsy paused and stared almost defiantly into the slanted blue eyes of the traveler, as he'd dubbed him, and smelt the traces of soap and girly perfume coming off him, along with the almost eliminated scent of alcohol. Beer and traces of whiskey.

He stood at eye level with Heero. Unflinchingly, he declared, "If you came back for more, don't depend on me to be your whore, mister."

Heero didn't flinch either. Something in him, though, still hadn't found the nerve to confront the bohemian; his brain was swimming with indecision and bright red lines of rules that were clashing with the erratic thought of the brunet man in front of him. The eyes of the gypsy boy searched him over as well and seemed to find nothing threatening in his expression and he brushed by him, passing through the curtain. The square of sunny yellow light from the door glowed at Heero's feet and then died as it swung close. He stared blankly off into the dimness of the room for a split-second, while every line and innate gesture of the previously exchanged words repeated in an insane din in his brain, trying to be interpreted sensibly.

He was having a hard time deciding. All his life he'd been a natural straight line, a so-dubbed stick in the virtually unmovable mud, a rule-abiding goodie two-shoe, but this one day of his life, this one moment… made every rule seem so damned stupid. There was no reason he should let Duo go. The law was god in this society. But those who made that law never had known Duo. They had never seen it through the criminal's eyes, as they drew those thick black lines and boxed in their lives. Heero knew Duo had reasons for doing what he did; he saw it whenever he smiled with that self-loathing, tawdry grin as plainly as if he had written it across his shirt. No body else could see that... or if they did, they didn't care.

Heero suddenly had an idea.

He stepped back out in the sunlight, squinted his blue eyes against the suddenly searing brightness, and let the curtain slip off the back of his hand. Like the bohemian's finger tips had in their velvet haste. To his right, he spotted Duo strolling along the garbage littered path towards the back of the grounds. The suitcase in hand rocking rhythmically, the backpack slung casually over his shoulder, the anonymous, distancing black hat completing a cunning, unassuming image. He'd already slipped ahead of him a good ten meters, walking no more briskly than an alley cat would stroll in the dark at midnight.

Heero began to jog after him and caught up once they reached the back gate of similar metal mess, and an identical sign in red paint. At the sound of the grass underfoot, he saw him speed up ever so slightly. The bohemian, or ex-bohemian more like it, distantly opened the gate and let it slap with a bone-dry rattle against the fence as he strolled on. Heero kept pace behind, calmly walking with equal precision in his step.

Prussian eyes were fixated on the back of the con man's head as they traveled across a parking lot littered with unmanned semi-trucks. Their hulls gleamed, the illustrious color logos hung in the background, and the scent of oil alluded through the air. Duo made no move to lose him as he traveled among the trucks.

"Duo."

The con man stopped, his shoulder length hair teasing in the wind, and looked sharply over his shoulder and his hand gripped on the backpack strap.

"Listen, I apologize for stealing from you and you've got everything back, safe and sound. What more do you want from me?" He snorted incredulously at the man's composed face. "Hey, don't think just because I kissed you last night means I'll let you tail me like a lost puppy. As you probably know, I'm sort of on the run. Not a lot of time to goof around, okay?"

"I want to talk to you." Heero stated that fact with a dull tone, the distance gaining in his voice. "You just keep walking away."

"You couldn't answer me before. All of a sudden you've become a talk-box?

Heero's eyes furrowed mildly, looking straight across into the defiant blue-violet eyes of a criminal. The series of earrings in his ear now were only little red dots along the cartilage, and the ornate golden hoops were absent from his wrist. Something pulled at the bottom of his stomach-disappointment perhaps-but the pure, strange, and tangled charisma he held never diminished, with or without the jewelry and bohemian clothes.

The gypsy glanced up and down the Japanese man's face as he stared at him, something churning behind his blue eyes. His keen, little blue human eyes.

"What?" he demanded. "I'm not in the mood to be patient, here."

"Last night." While his voice didn't falter in its indifferent tone, the expression muddled on his face. The distanced reserve mixed in with a more potent mix and distorted the sense of stoicism he'd worked in all his life. This wasn't normal to be doing. "Why did you kick me out?"

Duo didn't seem to be irked by the question, but that highly adaptable false grin or toothy sneer had faded considerably when he asked. The con man didn't pause at all, his tone half-flat. "I had a headache. I wanted to you to leave."

Heero hesitated, another question forming hazily at the top of his currently soupy mind. "What you said about my future-"

The con man rolled his eyes, turning fluidly to clap his hand on his shoulder. Heat sunk through his thin dress shirt and Heero flinched in anticipation, being revisited by memory. Something was so wildly attractive about the way he snipped so offhandedly and fought against Heero in his presence, didn't accept everything with a buttery smile. But it was also dangerous, he couldn't forget.

Duo leaned towards him again. "Mr. Yuy, listen to me."

He stopped as best he could and looked up straight into the bohemian's face, though the nervous heat still seared through his shoulder like fire.

"Last night, I was just a gypsy. Not your gypsy, not anybody's gypsy-just a stupid fortune-teller. And I can't read palms. Understand?" he said, the traces of bitterness palpable.

Heero nodded to himself.

"Last week, I was a bus driver. The week before that I was a teacher's assistant at an elementary school. A janitor, a street artist, a professional biker, a butcher. You have to understand that I'm not going to stay here and be your private little joy that reads your palm and seduces you, all right? Yesterday I was your fortune-teller, and tomorrow I could be your shoe-shiner, or your bank teller, or your waiter, or even your attorney, but that still wouldn't make it the truth."

Heero blinked quietly in response, absorbing all this as fast as it was being spewed at him. He wasn't interpreting it into common sense very well, but it was lingering in his mind nonetheless. The gleam in his deep blue eyes was calm and distant again; with traces of troubled thoughts shining through to the surface. It wasn't normal to be here, to be thinking like this.

"But today," Duo said, panting slightly and smile raw and painful to behold. But simultaneously so interesting with such feline prowess. "Today, I'm just a delivery boy, okay? Understand?"

"Perfectly," Heero responded dully, enchanted by the sinuous precision of his words, always splitting to the bone with ferocity but still covered in a friendly grin. It was so strange and almost savage, but beautiful. He watched quietly as the con man lifted his hand and took a step back away from him in preparation to leave.

"Good."

He grinned falsely, cheekily, one last time. Then he turned and walked away, leaving the blue-eyed man in the wake of his defiant footsteps. It was as simple and clean as that. When he rounded the back of a red shipping truck and his hand traced along the metal, he glanced back once, but saw no one. He'd left. With a sigh, he turned without regrets and headed for his truck.