Yami No Matsuei Fan Fiction / Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Living Shinigami ❯ Mornings ( Chapter 10 )

“Living Shinigami”

Chapter Ten

Mornings

By morning, it was clear that Duo had inherited his sleeping habits from his father. Both slept long past sunrise, meaning that Wufei and Hisoka ate their breakfast in relative peace. Around eight, the blond collect the dishes and took them to the kitchen.

“Asato takes forever to wake up,” Hisoka stated, returning. “Would you get Hijiri out of bed? I don’t know how to reacts to being awoken since being in the war.”

Wufei nodded, understanding. “I woke him whenever Heero or Quatre were away.”

The Chinese man’s path took him back to the red door, and he could hear the sound of Duo’s breathing as he slowly opened it. Sunlight was already seeping in through the window, giving Wufei a good chance to look around the space.

Everything was still sized for a child, from the dresser to the matching desk and chair. Stuffed animals lined a high shelf, a gap suggesting that one had gone missing or been taken down since their original arrangement.

A child’s gi and hakama hung from a closet door, dusty from over a decade of being undisturbed. Textbooks were stacked on the desk, and Wufei nearly choked when he noticed a half-finished worksheet sitting on top of them, the mathematics simple and the kana clumsy. When he’d entered the room and placed a hand against the inside of the doorframe, he’d felt the notches of a growing child tracking his progress.

The shinigami-to-be himself was curled up on a bed much too small for even his slight stature. Fast asleep, he clutched what looked to be the missing stuffed animal, a striped cat in black and white.

Throughout the war, the five pilots had been forced to learn how to wake each other for whatever reasons. Trowa and Heero were the easiest, needing only to be called. Quatre practically required the scent of tea to be roused from dreaming. Dou had delighted in learning that the best way to wake Wufei from a deep sleep was to throw things at him (preferably from a safe distance). Books worked the fastest.

The method for Duo was by far the strangest, and definitely the most difficult. Yelling wouldn’t work, he seemed to dodge in his sleep, and it even took a good half an hour of waving fresh coffee under his nose to bring him into full awareness. When he had asked the braided pilot the first time they shared a safe house without the others, Duo had flushed and abruptly changed the topic to lawn mowers.

The safe house had been in the desert.

In the end, he had been forced to pry it out of Quatre over the phone, costing him nearly a pound of tea from the nearby town.

Picking up a brush from the dresser, he crossed the room quietly, almost hating to disturb the peaceful sight of his comrade sleeping. Wufei pulled back the covers, fixing the yukata that Duo had apparently slept in for the sake of the man’s modesty.

The first thing one had to do when waking up Duo Maxwell was to get him out of his sleeping ball. Curled up, a bomb exploding under his pillow was unlikely to rouse him. Slipping a hand between his tucked legs and his stomach, Wufei tickled Duo just enough until his pose opened up and rolled away from him in an unconscious attempt to get away. “Kaa-san…”

The Chinese agent had to climb up onto the bed for the next part, which was to get Duo to sit up, grumbling sleepily the entire time. Wufei reflected that the fact that the shinigami’s half-asleep whispering were in Japanese should have tipped them off long ago that Duo was American like they’d supposed.

Moving himself behind the violet-eyed pilot, Wufei braced his knees against the base of his back to keep Duo from leaning back to far. A quick flick of his hand removed the simple black tie holding the end of his braid together, which was when the real work began.

No matter how tightly Duo braided his hair before bed, it always managed to unravel enough over the night to be a tangled mess each morning. Wufei was only about halfway through the mass when his comrade woke enough to realize that someone was brushing his hair, and only didn’t turn around because he knew that’d be a sure way to get his hair pulled.

“Fei?” he asked, straining to catch sight of that morning’s waker in the corner of his eye. It felt like Wufei. Heero’s style of brushing was very business-like, done with the same care and sense of efficiency he used when working on Wing. Quatre’s style was overly cautious of pulling even the smallest strand, done mostly with his hands until the last few stokes to get things in order. Trowa had watched the process once before flatly declaring that he’d just put the coffee pot next to Duo’s bed in the morning to brew it when the others weren’t around. As for Wufei, Duo suspected that he might have had longer hair back before the war. His strokes had the right balance of gentleness and strength needed to remove the snarls without removing the hair, with a few strong runs through already brushed out portions just because they felt good. Despite the embarrassment, he liked Wufei’s brushings better.

“Good morning, Duo,” Wufei said, setting the brush down to work out a particularly bad snarl that the brush kept catching on without untangling. “Kurosaki’s gone to wake Tsuzuki. The two of you even sleep the same.”

Duo’s smile could be heard from his voice. “Then it wasn’t a dream. I’m really home.” He felt Wufei pause. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to abandon all of you guys. I’ve got time before I start up work here. Not as if it’s hard to get from here to there.”

“Do you have to ride a dragon each time?” Wufei asked, running a few final strokes through tangle-free hair and smiling as Duo leaned into the brush. Setting it aside, he began to separate it into three sections. “I don’t imagine you’d be able to keep that secret for too long.”

“Na, I was just too tired, and it was the first time I’d gone without Tou-san,” the shinigami said with a contented sign. Getting his hair braided felt so good. It was almost disappointing when Wufei tied off the end and announced that he was finished, though it did mean that he was able to turn around and face his friend. “So, you and Kaa-san already eat?”

“Some time ago,” Wufei confirmed, standing up. He left the room to give Duo privacy and returned to the living room, where a still sleepy Tsuzuki waved his fingers at him from over a large mug of black coffee. “He’s getting dressed.”

“You still have to brush his hair?” Tsuzuki asked, eyeing Wufei. At the younger man’s confusion, he pointed to several long hairs clinging to Wufei’s legs. “We used to have to do the exact same thing, though it didn’t take nearly as long I’m betting.”

The subject of their conversation burst cheerfully into the room before they could continue any further, all smiles and grins and glomps as he made his way over to the coffee pot. An hour later and the three of them minus Hisoka, who’d left for work shortly after getting his husband up, made their way to the ministry building to meet up with Wakaba.