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"Drabbles"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: R A/N: For Ry who requested #30 from 54 Writing
Prompts, "Do you think you could just please go one day without
pissing me off?" With 2x3 Warnings: language Pairings: 2x3
Thirty The cupboards had been reorganized. Trowa opened the one above the coffeemaker, the one that should have held the coffee mugs, specifically his travel mug, and instead was confronted with the collection of porcelain cats that had decorated the mantle of the fireplace when they first moved into the apartment. Trowa opened the next cupboard. Plates. Pilsners. Shot glasses. Tupperware. More plates. Bowls. Little plates. Canned goods. Plates - How many fucking plates did they even have? Heero chose that moment to walk into the kitchen. He surveyed the ten open cupboard doors in silence and walked past Trowa to open the fridge. "Hn." Heero stood, staring at the fridge, and Trowa felt his annoyance and dismay over the cabinets morph into fear. What had happened to the fridge? Trowa stepped up behind Heero and saw that it, too, had been subjected to reorganization and what looked like a more thorough cleaning than it had probably ever seen before. Everything was arranged by color. Water, vodka, milk, mustard, lemon juice, orange preserves, ketchup - "What the fuck is wrong with him?" Trowa muttered. Heero shook his head, grabbed one of his sickeningly green breakfast smoothies - sandwiched between two bottles of Heineken and a green-labeled container of parmesan cheese, and closed the fridge. Trowa sighed and turned back to the cupboards, wondering if there was any chance of finding his coffee mug without having to go and ask. Heero leaned against the stove and watched him fruitlessly open a few more cupboards. "He's awake," Heero offered between sips. Trowa glared. "I'm sure he is. He's probably counting down the minutes until I go in there and ask him where my damn mug is." Heero nodded in agreement. "Probably." Trowa asked himself, not for the first time, why he had agreed to move off campus and into an apartment with Heero and his best friend and baseball teammate, Duo. Heero was fine - more than fine. He and Trowa had dated, briefly, before deciding that, as good as the sex was, they were better suited as friends than anything else. But Duo... It was like he had decided his sole purpose in life - outside of maintaining unbelievably high grades considering his devotion to baseball and partying - was to annoy Trowa. It had started the very first day after they moved in, when Duo had barged into the bathroom, without knocking, to interrupt Trowa while he shaved before taking a shower. Duo had stood there, staring at Trowa's naked body, for a full minute before Trowa cleared his throat and Duo flushed. He'd expected the other man to leave - had wanted him to - but instead Duo had smirked, offered up a way too chipper "good morning" and asked Trowa when he could catch the next performance. This - reorganizing the cupboards and the fridge - was only yet another example of all the ways Duo went out of his way to annoy the shit out of Trowa. He finally gave up and left the kitchen, stormed down the hall and, not even bothering to knock, opened Duo's bedroom door. Duo was, surprisingly, still in bed. He was almost always the first one up of the three of them, always lurking in the kitchen or the bathroom with way too much too say that early in the day. He jumped when Trowa banged the door open, though, and blinked red, swollen eyes at Trowa. What the hell? It looked like he had been crying. Trowa was momentarily thrown by that and he found himself wondering what had happened. Probably someone had told Duo off for being the utterly annoying shit that he was. "Where is my mug?" Trowa growled. It took Duo a moment, he rubbed at his eyes and shifted around under the blankets and Trowa glared. "Oh. Right. Sorry. I was - last night was weird and I just had to do something, you know, to -" "Where is it?" Trowa interrupted, knowing that Duo might launch into a fifteen minute monologue if he didn't head him off immediately. "Top rack of the dishwasher if no one's unloaded it. It was in the sink last night and I -" "I didn't ask you to wash it." "Yeah, because you're under the delusion that you don't actually need to wash it and -" "If it melted -" "I checked the fucking heat settings. It should be fine," Duo was glaring himself, now, clutching his comforter and looking, for once, uncomfortable with Trowa's ire. Trowa had the sudden realization that he was being an ass, that he had overreacted and - and he had just stormed in here and yelled at Duo for washing his coffee mug for him. He sighed. "Last night was weird?" Duo frowned and he looked wary, as though expecting Trowa's words to lead to a trap. Trowa gestured at Duo's face. "You're... upset or something. What happened?" Duo snorted and shook his head. "Forget it man. None of your fucking concern." Trowa was taken aback by the uncharacteristic ice in Duo's voice. "Duo -" "If you don't mind, my morning class was cancelled and I'd like to get some sleep so could you kindly get the fuck out?" -o- It wasn't until that afternoon, as Trowa settled into his normal chair in the middle of the lecture hall for Russian History, that Trowa even saw Duo again. Despite both being history majors, they had never had a single class in common except for this one. All history majors were required to take at least one course in European history, so, even though Trowa was concentrating on American history and Duo on Middle Eastern, they had taken Russian History because the professor was a vocal and unapologetic anarchist whose lectures tended to devolve into diatribes against the failures of capitalism. Usually, Duo sat near Trowa - beside, in front or behind him - and usually, Duo passed at least a few notes with running commentary on the lecture or lewd suggestions of how certain conflicts could have been resolved with orgies instead of assassinations. It was, Trowa would never admit, something he actually looked forward to. Today, however, Duo took a seat in the last row of the lecture hall, not even looking in Trowa's direction before he walked past. Trowa found himself clenching his jaw and his pen equally tight. He had the crazy idea to just get up and go sit beside Duo, but he abandoned the thought as the prof entered the room, followed closely by Wufei, who endured the prof's glare and even looked contrite for a moment before he worked his way down the rows and took the seat on Trowa's right. "Where's..." Wufei's voice trailed off as he looked around and spotted Duo. "So you finally did it." Trowa frowned. "Finally did what?" "Acted like enough of an asshole that even Duo won't forgive you," Wufei said, not even looking at Trowa as he pulled out a notebook and started to copy down the outline the prof was writing on the front chalkboard. Trowa scowled and he wanted to say something - wanted to defend himself, wanted to point out that Duo was the asshole here - but the prof started to lecture and Trowa had seen what the man did to students who tried to carry on side conversations while he was speaking. Trowa was able to concentrate on the lecture, but only barely. He was too used to Duo's presence and found himself looking up whenever the prof said something that, in another context, could be taken in a very different way. But Duo wasn't beside him, wasn't smirking and furiously scribbling notes for Trowa to shake his head and roll his eyes at. By the time the lecture ended, Trowa felt strangely bereft and decided to catch up to Duo before he left the room. The prof, however, had other ideas. He held Trowa after to discuss his latest paper, to try and convince him that American history was for half-wits and capitalist dogs and really, Trowa should change his focus to Russian History because he had a natural understanding of the complexities and a flair for writing that would be wasted on the fools in American history. It didn't matter, the prof assured him, that he had his thesis half written and absolutely no course work to support the change of fields. He could catch up, he could revise his thesis and - It was twenty minutes before Trowa could politely extricate himself, and by that point, Duo's beat-up Jeep was gone from the parking lot behind the lecture hall. Trowa sighed as he checked his watch. 5:15. No doubt Duo was on his way to his job at the dive bar a few blocks from their apartment where he tended bar a few nights a week. For some reason, the idea of letting Duo just go and continue to be this angry - to let him keep avoiding Trowa - didn't sit well. Duo had never blown up like that at Trowa, no matter how angry Trowa got with him for whatever new scheme to annoy him Duo had come up with, no matter how snarky Trowa was - Duo just shrugged it off, smirked or offered a comeback before going on with his day. But for some reason, today was different. Today was wrong and Trowa couldn't let it keep going. So he drove over to the bar and parked himself in a corner, careful to avoid the sticky counter top of the bar, and waited for Duo's shift to start. When Duo spotted him, Trowa saw his mouth twitch, saw his lips curve upwards for a second before flattening out and then turning downward in a frown and it made Trowa feel like even more of an asshole. Duo sighed and walked over. "What can I get you?" "Can we talk?" Duo shook his head and gestured to the nearly empty bar. "No can do - a bit busy here." Trowa glared but Duo just stared back at him. "Look, Duo, about this morning, I -" "You want to order something or what?" Duo appeared completely unfazed by Trowa's glare. "PBR." Duo nodded and walked away. He deposited a slightly overflowing pilsner glass in front of Trowa only seconds later and walked away without a word. Four PBRs, a plate of cheese fries and countless glares later, Duo took his break and Trowa threw down enough money to cover his bill before he left the bar and walked around to the back, where he knew Duo took his break even on the coldest of nights because he hated the stale cigarette smell of the bar and tried to escape it whenever he could. Sure enough, Duo was leaning against the graffitied brick wall, eyes closed and head tilted back while the streetlight spilled across him. "I'm sorry." Duo started, eyes opening comically wide. "What the fuck? Tro, just -" "I'm sorry for yelling at you this morning. You... you did something nice and I acted like an asshole. I'm sorry." "Yeah, well -" "But you - you reorganized the entire kitchen and you color coded the fridge. Who does that?" "For fuck's sake!" Duo interrupted angrily. He tugged at his bangs with his fingers and he looked on the verge of violence. "Do you think you could just go one day without pissing me off?" Trowa stared, at a momentary loss for words. "Me?" He demanded when he was finally able to get a handle on how absurd the question was. " I piss you off? Duo, you annoy the shit out of me every day. You -" "I try my damnedest to be nice to you! I try to fucking - Trowa, you've been bitching about how the kitchen storage makes no sense for months now. And you always say you can't find shit in the fridge and I - I was just trying to do something right for once since apparently I'm fucking incompetent and hell, if I can't make it into Stanford for grad school I kind of need to find something else to do and I figured I could practice -" "You didn't get in?" Duo deflated and he shook his head. "No." Trowa frowned as he realized. "Yesterday - you got the rejection letter?" "Email. I got the rejection email, Tro. I'm not even worth the cost of postage." "That's -" "Better for the environment, yeah. I know. I'm not really in the mood for one of your sustainability lectures right now, though." "I was going to say that's complete bullshit and they must be idiots." "Oh." Trowa walked over and leaned against the wall beside Duo. He didn't really know what to say - Duo wasn't the kind of person who appreciated sympathy and he hated to hear false platitudes about 'things happen for a reason.' "I piss you off everyday?" Duo sighed. "Forget about it. I just - I'm in a shitty mood and I should have kept my mouth shut." "No, I want to hear what you think." Duo snorted and shook his head. "Trust me on this, Tro. You really, really don't." "I do." Duo groaned. "Tro, seriously. I - I'm just being an idiot and it's nothing." "You're right. You do try to be nice to me," Trowa sighed. "I... I don't always see it and I'm not good at saying thank you." "Please don't do this to me, Tro. Not tonight. Not - just please, please go back to being an asshole." Trowa frowned. "You just asked me not to piss you off and now you -" Duo was suddenly surging forward, suddenly wrapping his arms around Trowa's neck and kissing him and it was completely unexpected, completely without finesse, completely amazing. Trowa pulled Duo closer and he kissed him back, falling into the sensation of Duo's mouth and his heat and his scent as though it was the most natural thing in the world. As though this was what they were supposed to be doing. Should have been doing all along. When they finally pulled away, when Duo finally cleared his throat and Trowa saw his flushed cheeks and his swollen lips, Trowa couldn't help but smirk. Duo, looking anywhere but at him, didn't see the expression. "I, ah. Sorry about that. I just - like I said. I'm a fucking wreck and I... you piss me off every day because you're just there and you're so fucking perfect and -" "I thought I was an asshole?" Duo finally looked at him, saw the smirk and he frowned. "You... you're not pissed." "Should I be?" "I mean, I just threw myself at you - literally. And you, well, you kind of hate me." "I don't hate you, Duo." "Oh yeah. Sure. You just spend each day regretting moving in with me and Heero and wishing I would just crawl off and die." "I -" "Don't even bother to deny it." "I don't want you to crawl off and die." Duo shook his head and ran a hand through his bangs. "Sure." "Duo. You color coded the fridge for me." Trowa grabbed Duo's hand and pulled him close. "Yeah, well -" "And you kissed me." "Look, if this is some kind of pity -" "Duo. Stop talking." Duo glared at him and Trowa smirked again. He reached out and brushed his thumb over Duo's lips. "I had no idea kissing you would feel so perfect," Trowa said before leaning down and replacing his thumb with his lips.
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