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"Going the Distance"Written By: Clara Barton Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. The following
is an intellectual exercise with no intention of profit. That said,
these characterizations, words, and situations are mine. Please ask
before reprinting. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: Angst, language, violence, sex, AU Pairings: 1x2x3 Summary: Duo Maxwell has just signed on to join Team Gundam Wing, an upstart League of Legends team looking to win the World Championships. Duo Maxwell, the first openly gay professional gamer. Duo Maxwell, the guy hated by almost all of Reddit. Duo Maxwell, the guy whose own brother hates him. Duo Maxwell, the guy who really just wants to find a team that doesn't hate him. A/N: This fic is an AU that has the boys playing
professional League of Legends. I'm going to try my best to not get
bogged down too much in game terminology or things like that, but,
well, I WILL reference the game and try to explain as much as I can,
as I go. I'm also way too lazy to make up "new" teams for
the league, so I will be using existing teams and players, with the
exceptions of Team Gundam Wing, Zodiac Gaming, and the Valkyries.
So… I will be referencing real people and real teams. "Going the Distance" Chapter Three The next morning Duo woke up early and found himself aimlessly wandering through the house. Relena was still asleep, and Sally had apparently stayed over at a friend's house last night. Everyone else, Duo assumed, were still asleep. He went into the kitchen and started the coffee pot, but as he watched the dark liquid drip down he decided he didn't want it. He didn't want the granola bars or bananas either, and after just a glass of water he went back to his room and changed out of his pajamas and into his favorite track pants and his battered Major League Gaming sweater. As he pulled on his sneakers he reflected over his history with this sweater. He had won it at the age of eleven, when he had won a local gaming tournament, taking home this sweater and a fifty dollar Best Buy gift card for coming in first in a Halo free-for-all. Solo had come in second, and he'd been pissed to have been bested by his little brother - he hadn't even wanted to take Duo, let alone allow him to compete. Duo had immediately put the sweater on, and he'd been as much of an asshole as his older brother, rubbing his victory in and Solo had pushed him down and the left sleeve had ripped on the elbow. Duo left the gaming house, fingering the eight year old hole and he wondered if he would ever be better than Solo at anything again. After his performance yesterday, Duo was fairly certain he wasn't going to be better than him at League anytime soon. He walked down the empty street, enjoying the quiet Sunday morning, until he got to a park. It was still early and relatively empty, so Duo sat down on a swing and allowed himself to just be. To try to put all of his thoughts, his demons aside and let the sun warm up his face while he lazily swung back and forth. He was glad that no one had tried to talk to him last night - the van ride back from the game had been silent, and as soon as the team arrived back at the house everyone went their seperate ways, Wufei storming up to his bedroom, Heero and Trowa sedately walking upstairs to their own room, Quatre off to the back yard where he did yoga or something for a few hours and Relena had grabbed a pint of ice cream from the fridge and disappeared into her own room. Maybe talking would have helped him, but Duo doubted it. He had fucked up - had fucked up big time. But his teammates hadn't done so well either, and Duo wondered what the hell had happened. Was this really all his fault? Did his presence antagonize Wufeit that much? But even if it did, the team had serious issues - no one listened to Quatre, Wufei seemed content to ignore the rest of the team and even Trowa and Heero seemed so focused on their own actions that they blocked out the rest of the enemy team until it was too late. This wasn't the team that had come in fifth last year, that was for damn sure. Duo wasn't sure how much time had passed, but the sun was higher up in the sky when a soccer ball came flying at his head. He barely managed to catch it, and he looked up to see that a crowd had gathered on the soccer field near the swings. "Sorry!" A guy with golden-brown hair called out. "Mind throwing it back?" Duo dropped the ball to the ground and kicked it back towards the guy, glad he at least didn't embarrass himself in front of complete strangers - his aim was true and the ball rolled right to the feet of the guy. The guy passed the ball off and then started to jog towards Duo. "Nice kick!" He said with a grin. He was handsome, with kind of bland features that were highlighted by his tan and piercing gray eyes. "Thanks," Duo shrugged. "Used to play when I was younger." "Want to play with us now? We're short a few guys today and we've got odd numbers." Duo hesitated for a moment, but gray eyes made some kind of adorable pouting expression. Duo laughed. "Yeah, sure. Why not?" "Awesome. I'm Jason, by the way." He held out his hand. Duo shook his hand, appreciating the firm grip. "Duo." "Nice to meet you, Duo." They walked back over to the other guys. "Everyone, this is Duo. Duo - this is everyone. He's agreed to fill in for Bart. Which means you're with us skins, Duo," Jason said and gestured to where six guys stood removing their shirts. Duo arched an eyebrow. "It's like fifty degrees out." Jason shrugged. "Yeah, but no one ever remembers to bring the same colored shirts so we take turns between shirts and skins." Duo rolled his eyes and it was on the tip of his tongue to make some comment about Jason using this as an excuse to check out guys, but realized this wasn't the time or the place. Making a joke about checking out guys surrounded by strangers - no doubt completely straight strangers - was definitely one way to make his weekend go from shitty to unbearably shitty in record time. So Duo pulled off his sweater and added it to the pile of clothes. "What position do you want to play?" Jason asked as he pulled off his own shirt and Duo fought to keep his eyes up, away from Jason's lean torso and the tattoo of barbed wire around his neck and collarbone. Maybe Duo had a weakness for guys with tattoos. Maybe Duo had a weakness for guys with light colored eyes and great smiles. Maybe Duo just really had a weakness for guys in general right now and really needed to get laid. "Uh," he realized Jason was still waiting for a response. "Mid?" He offered. It was where he had played in middle school, the last time he had really played physical sports competitively. Jason nodded. "Great." The game was fairly disorganized, with a lot of fouls and a lot of arguments about the fouls, but it was probably the most fun Duo had had in months. Everyone was yelling at each other, good natured insults about being too slow and not paying attention, and it felt good to be running, to be dribbling the ball and passing it off and shooting at the goal - to score. It felt really damn good to have Jason wrap his sweaty arms around Duo's neck and congratulate him while the rest of the team cheered as well. It only lasted for an hour, and then the guys started to drift away, one by one, until eventually it was just Jason and Duo passing the ball back and forth lazily. Jason tossed Duo his sweatshirt and Duo pulled it on, grateful for the warmth but sad to see Jason's sweaty torso covered up by his own sweatshirt. "Think you might be available next Sunday?" Jason asked him. Duo shrugged. "Probably." Most Sunday games were in the afternoon, until later in the season, and he doubted TGW would start to do early morning practices anytime soon. Although after yesterday... maybe they should. "Awesome. Well, you're welcome to play anytime you want." "Thanks, man. This was fun." Jason smiled at him. "You know, Matt's having a party at his place tonight - you should come. It's that house over on the corner. It'll be pretty chill. But you could bring your girlfriend or your... whoever." Jason blushed a little and Duo had to raise an eyebrow. "Or my boyfriend?" He helpfully supplied. Jason blushed harder. "I'm not trying to insult you," Jason said, his words stumbling together. "Just saying..." Duo shrugged. "Not insulted. But my boyfriend dumped me a few months ago - I don't think he'd be interested in coming to a party, no matter how chill." Jason stood up a little straighter. "So you're available?" Duo had to laugh. It felt good to have someone express an interest in him, even if it wasn't the smoothest delivery. "Yeah - but not for the party. Not tonight. I've got practice." "Practice? You're an athlete? Let me guess - tennis?" Duo had to shake his head. "No, man. I'm ah, I'm a pro gamer." Jason arched an eyebrow. "Really? That's like, a thing?" Duo nodded. "Yep. My team is the fifth ranked League of Legends team in North America." Jason looked impressed. "Shit. That's cool. Uh, what is League of Legends?" Duo had to smile. He remembered explaining the game to Alex the first time. He hadn't really understood, and certainly hadn't been that interested in it. "It's a computer game. A multiplayer online battle arena game." He looked at Jason's face, but he still seemed interested. "You have two teams of five players fight against each other on this map - this battleground - and the goal is to destroy the base of the other team before they destroy yours." Jason nodded. "Okay. Uh... that sounds pretty easy." Duo laughed. "Sure. That part does. See, the map is split into three lanes - top, middle and bottom. So you have these three paths to get to the other team's base. But between those lanes you have the jungle, which is this dark area of the map where you can sneak up on the other players and try to kill them." Jason nodded. "Sounds cool. So, like, is it like Halo or Call of Duty? You just have guns and shoot each other?" "No - that's the cool part. You have five players on each team - a top laner, a mid laner, a marksman and a support in the bottom lane and then a jungler, who roams around the jungle and tries to gank - or surprise - the enemy team and get his own team ahead. But each of these players - all ten - play different characters, and each of the characters have different abilities." Jason was starting to look a little lost. "Have you ever played Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter or... Mario Party?" Jason laughed. "Yeah, sure." "Cool. Well, you know how each character has different abilities? Like Subzero has different spells and attacks?" Jason nodded. "Same thing for League characters. There are over one hundred of them, and they all have different skills. Some are long ranged - those are the marksmen, or the attack-damage carries. Some are really good at healing and shields and crowd control - stuns and things - and those are usually supports, who try to keep the marksmen alive until they have enough power to kill. You've got mages, or magic uses who can be long ranged or short ranged. You've got melee champs who use short range attacks. You've got bruisers, who are just these beefy dudes who take a lot of damage and deal a decent amount. You've got tanky dudes who just stand there and absorb everything you can throw at them. It's... you can build all of these really interesting team compositions around these different abilities." "Okay." Jason nodded, and seemed interested again. "So... like how does your marksman get powerful?" "Time and experience. Each team has minions - these little creeps who spawn at your base and go out to try to protect you. So every time you kill an enemy minion, you get gold and experience. The jungle also has neutral minions - these monster camps like wolves and wraiths and buff camps - if you kill these certain camps you get a buff, so you can do more magic damage or more attack damage. And of course, you get gold and experience for killing enemy characters - enemy champions. You use the experience to level up your abilities and you use the gold to buy items to increase your damage or to build up protective stats." "Okay. That doesn't sound so easy anymore." Duo chuckled. "Yeah. It's not. It's pretty damn hard." "What do you play? What... lane?" "I'm a Jungler, actually. So I live in the shadows and then jump out and try to get kills and feed my team - by feed I mean deliver kills for them, so they can get strong. Sometimes you do that by camping a lane, basically just hiding and attacking the same enemy over and over again so he doesn't get ahead." "Sounds like an asshole thing to do." Duo shrugged. "It is. But sometimes... sometimes you've got to be an asshole." Jason nodded. "And your team is the fifth best in the country?" Duo nodded. And maybe he hadn't done anything to get the team there, and maybe the team sure as hell hadn't played like the fifth best team in the country yesterday. But they were number five. And Duo really, really wanted to be able to say they were better than that. "So... you're like famous, aren't you?" Duo shook his head. "No. Not really. Like... a few hundred thousand people in the world know who I am. Maybe." "That's a hell of a lot more people than know who I am," he pointed out. Duo shrugged. "Well, that just means you don't have a few hundred thousand people thinking you're trash at your job." Jason arched an eyebrow. Duo sighed and shrugged. "The gaming community is pretty vocal. The fans and the teams use Reddit and Youtube to say a bunch of shit about players. Comes with the job, I guess. But it's annoying. Especially when I'm the only openly gay player." Jason nodded. "So you're like the Michael Sam of video games?" Duo had to laugh. "Yeah. Sure." "So you're famous - hated, but famous. You're the Michael Sam of video games. You're hot and you're funny - and you're pretty good at soccer for someone who sits in front of a computer all day. Why is it you don't have a boyfriend?" Duo winced. "That's a pretty long and really fucking embarrassing story." Jason nodded. "And you don't want to tell me because you think I'm cute and want to ask me out on a date instead?" Duo laughed. Maybe Jason hadn't been smooth at first, but that had been pretty damn clever. "Yeah, you're cute, and yeah, I'd like to ask you out on a date - but my schedule is crazy. We practice every day from lunch until two or three A.M. My Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are usually game days or at least scrimmages. I don't really have time for dating." "You know, there's this Starbucks down the road that has pretty awesome croissants," Jason said. Duo arched an eyebrow in confusion. "We could go there... for breakfast... sometime..." Jason said. "Oh. Yeah. That would be awesome." Jason grinned and Duo had to smile back. "How about Tuesday morning? I don't go into work until noon, so we could meet at ten?" Jason suggested. "Perfect." Duo told him. They smiled at each other again, and then Duo felt awkward. Alex, his last boyfriend, had started off as a drunken hook-up at a party. They hadn't done this whole awkward date planning/goodbye thing - they'd had sex and passed out and woken up in the same bed and started on round two. Duo held out his hand and Jason laughed and shook it. Duo was about to let go, but Jason pulled him close and kissed him, a quick, fairly platonic press of his smiling lips against Duo's. "See you Tuesday," Jason said and he let Duo go. Duo could only stare after him as Jason jogged away. -o- They guys didn't start to wander out of their rooms until lunch time, when Pagan laid out cold-cuts, bread and chips for them. Duo made himself a turkey and cheese sandwich, snagged a Coke from the fridge, and went to the back porch to eat. Relena joined him a few minutes later. "Well," she said after they ate in silence for a while. "Yesterday could have gone worse." Duo looked at her. "How?" Relena shrugged. "You could have punched Wufei. Or Quatre could have. Or you could have held him down while Quatre punched him. And that would have been pretty bad - you'd both be suspended and Wufei might sue the team." Duo had to laugh. "Okay, so short of assault, how could it have gone worse?" "Well... you tried to have Quatre's back. That was something. And despite Wufei being a complete shithead, you tried to gank his lane - and you tried to help out Heero and Trowa too, it just... didn't quite work out." "No. Not quite. Not too mention I threw the damn game with that Baron play." Relena shrugged. "Baron is always risky - it's the most dangerous Jungle camp for a reason. The game was already lost at that point. You tried to get us back in it. You took a risk and you failed. You weren't the only one." "Maybe not. But I'm the one with the most to prove." "Really?" Relena arched an eyebrow. "Last season Ralph was the Team Captain - Quatre certainly feels like he has a lot to prove. Last season Ralph and Wufei were amazing - they would just start roaming the map and killing everything in sight, but Wufei has to prove he wasn't just relying on Ralph. Last season Trowa and Heero put up the best numbers for their positions - now they have to prove it wasn't a fluke. All you have to prove is that you're more than Solo Maxwell's gay brother." Duo hadn't quite looked at it like that before. "Okay... well, now that you've said how you really feel, can you maybe massage my ego a little or something?" Relena laughed and Duo had to smile at the sound. "No," she said, still smiling. "You've got your friends for that. It's my job to tell you to get your head out of your ass. It's my job to tell you that Sally and Quatre wanted you on this team for a reason. It's my job to tell you that Trowa and Heero threatened to quit if Wufei's top Jungle choice was picked over you." Duo blinked. "What?" "I'm not going to repeat myself. Right now, it's your job to listen. TGW needs you. You've got raw talent - now is the time to mold that into something that can help carry this team to a World Championship. Think you can do that?" "That.. was a damn good pep talk," Duo had to admit. Relena gave him a sweet smile. "Thanks. I practiced it all morning." She took Duo's empty plate from him and gestured towards the house. "Now get off your ass and get to practice." "Yes sir!" He said and saluted before following her orders. The other guys were already assembled, sorting through their gear and unpacking. "So glad you decided to join us," Wufei muttered. Duo bit down on the comeback that flew to the tip of his tongue. Instead, he nodded and started to unpack. "Okay," Quatre said as they all set up their equipment and logged into their accounts. "Let's put yesterday behind us and really focus today. We need to move forward and we need to figure out how we can play better as individuals and as a team. Let's start off with a warm-up game and go from there. Okay? Everyone ready to focus?" Quatre looked around the room at each of them in turn. Wufei glared back, Duo nodded, Trowa inclined his head slightly, but Heero shifted his eyes over to Duo. "Are you sure your head is in this?" Heero asked him. "Yeah?" Duo frowned. He could understand if Heero wasn't his biggest fan after yesterday, but he hadn't really expected him to call him out, either. "You're focused on this. On us and not hooking up with guys in the park?" Duo stared at him. "We saw you," Trowa said, his voice soft. "When we went running this morning." "So?" Duo demanded. "So fucking what? It was ten in the morning - I wasn't shirking team responsibilities." "You were just trying to get laid," Wufei sneered. Fuck this. Fuck all of them. Duo closed his eyes and forced himself to count to ten. He reminded himself what Relena had said to him earlier. He drew in a deep breath. "I'm here, right now, to play. If there are team rules about relationships that I broke, then let's talk about that later. Right now, let's focus. Yesterday was my first day losing a game as a member of this team, and I sure as hell don't want to make that a regular habit." Quatre nodded in acceptance of his words. Wufei muttered something about horny faggots but turned back to his computer. Trowa and Heero, however, both stared at him for a moment longer before Trowa said something to Heero and they turned around as well. "Oh," Duo added, because maybe he was focused - maybe he did want to win - but he sure as hell wanted to prove to himself, more than anyone else, that he was more than Solo Maxwell's gay brother, "I'm going to play Jungle Fizz." -o- Another note: Okay, hopefully Duo explaining the game to Jason helped clarify some things? If there are things that still don't make sense, please PM or say it in a review - I can always have Duo explain more things to Jason as their... whatever that is happens. But a note about Fizz, because I'm not sure how to explain him otherwise. Fizz is a fish, well, a fish with legs. He's traditionally played in the middle lane. He does magic damage, but he's short range. He's kind of an assassin and he's really bursty - as in he jumps in, kills you really fast, and jumps back out. He's a tough champion because if you don't get an early lead he's completely ineffective. He is NOT traditionally played in the Jungle, for a lot of reasons. I have Duo so fond of him because he isn't supposed to go in the Jungle, and also because Fizz is adorable and terrifying. Go to youtube and type in "Fizz animation" and you can see him and hear some of his dialogue and his abilities. If you want to. ~ * ~ |
