Chapter 2 — Yea, Though I

He looks at me three days later distastefully with a brusque little growl I detect from the back of his morning-ragged throat, curling back his lip to bare his teeth, a gagging wolf effect. I can tell he hates it already, the way he shifts it around and is constantly poking at it indiscreetly when he believes I’m too busy wolfing to glance his way. Ha. I should make him wear it everyday, sexy sneering fleabag. More bitter black coffee is donated to his growling stomach, and my charity of rubber Egg McMuffins isn’t doing bad, either.

"That stuff is going to kill you," Heero growls flatly.

Blue sparks shoot my direction, over Shinegami’s black rims.

Danger bongos drum.

"Thanks for the sentiment," I shoot back. My teeth gleam and he winces distastefully. Gleam with plastic-tasting, slate gray, chunky meat so charmingly that I think I should grin wider, and I do. Goddamn, I love life.

Though I don’t plan on surviving an overly long time, especially not to let bad cholesterol literally stab me in the heart.

And yet, at that thought, I still remain as freakishly happy as I’ve been the entire day. Mostly because when you can successfully force-feed your foxy brunette, taciturn best friend your homeland’s plastic junk food and then dress his pretty face with your favorite sun killing shades, it’s considered a victory of sorts. I do, and I decided early this morning I would get plastered, disappointingly found no booze in the area, and settled for McDonald’s for the romantic persuasion power I need to sweep Heero off his feet. I grin broadly repeatedly as I suck on my sugary beverage and slurp around in the shredded ice cubes. Mornings like these are gorgeous, rain splattering on the glass doors in waterfall sheets and artificial, stark butter yellow lights glowing overhead, hot food in my belly, Heero in glossy black sunglasses…

If only Solo could see me now.

He’d be slapping me on the back, of course! I grin again.

"Solo... your face... it’s all red."

It’s musty and dark in here, a suffocating kind of black that inflicts instant claustrophobia in even short, niche-loving street rats like myself. Black that hums and sings above my head like distant trains and machines whirring. Before I can even look up to him again, hunched lithely on the crate taller than myself, his gruff, dirty, familiar hand is buried in my hair and fiercely tousling it in his characteristic display of affection. He scratches at my head desperately, needing badly, kneading his fingers through my greasy brown hair and I freeze for a second. He’s reassuring me along with himself. I didn’t understand back then. Usually, he would smile warmly at me -- too warm, I realized later, for a doomed street rat with any reasoning left could have ever without driving himself mad. He would smile at me, because he said I was a chance for the future and I gave him hope. I always smiled back.

"Yo, Duo." Grungy fingers shove my bangs in my eyes. I still can’t see him, forced to gaze at the splintering wooden crate stamped with smudged green ink. I hear him grinning. He’s happy to see me, but something tells me he really didn’t want to just yet. "What’cha doing here so late? Need some water?"

"Naw, s’okay," I refuse, mumbling. The hand in my hair, just scratching and petting, gets old. I swat it away and pout my lip, glaring up at him. He looks skinny, weak, and ratty crouched on the rice crate, but he’s so perfect to me. "Solo, why’s your face red like that? You should be sleeping!"

Lit by a singular yellow streetlamp leaking through the broken warehouse boards, he turns his head away and rubs at his face.

"Solo…" I whine and stomp my foot. "What’s w’ong?"

He perks up and grins at me, scruffy gray-brown hair swirling around his eyes. "Girl troubles, Duo," he announces happily, like it’s no big deal. Mangled fabric swishes and he’s standing jauntily next to me on the cold concrete, elbowing me playfully in the shoulder. "You don’t need to worry ‘bout girls, though, they’ll just flock to you, kiddo. You’re real cute."

"Girl t’oubles?"

He leads me out of his hiding place, greasy arm slung around my shoulder; it’s his sanctuary that he likes to retreat to every Friday since we settled down in the junkyard.

"Yeah, Duo. T’oubles." He laughs.

I yank at his shirt. "Like what?"

"Oh, this pretty girl… and I," he says, nonchalantly. His green eyes turn wistful, skyward, and meet with rusty metal beams. "We’re not exactly… meant to see each other, if you know what I mean." His eyes are sad, no grin left in his expression. It hurt me. A lot, but I felt like I could have stopped it somehow, like a small stone on a butterfly’s wing, just heavy enough not to be pushed off alone.

"What happened, Solo? You’re sad," I lament quietly, eyes glued to him. I suppose I wanted to protect him despite being two feet shorter and years younger, I wanted to pay him back, help him like he’d done to help me.

He laughs at that. "It’s okay, Duo." Another hand buries in my bushy hair. "She and I just can’t be friends anymore because she’s moving."

"Why?"

"Her daddy doesn’t like me. Doesn’t want me to play with her anymore."

"Well… that’s s-s-stupid! You don’t have a daddy! He should be nice to you!"

Laughter. Cool, liquid black air, an alleyway scattered with green trash bags. "I know, he probably should, but he doesn’t have to. He’s very powerful."

"…He’s not an o’phan, huh?" I grouse, crabby at the fact someone is mean to my best friend carelessly, for stupid reasons.

"Nope." He laughs. I really amused him back then. "Aw, Duo, you don’t have to worry about me. You should think about the girl you’re going to have someday."

"Girl?" I squeak, almost terrified. I jerk to a stop and splatter him with a raspberry. "Yuck! They just pull my hair and giggle and stuffs! No way!"

Soaked in blackness and rail thin, Solo pauses in his fluid, catlike movements and stares back at me, green eyes blank for a second. Something flickers in his gaze and he slings his arm around me again, this time warmer and more comforting than casual and roughhousing. It’s cold in the alley and I’m still tattered up from the day’s scrounging for food and playing with metal scraps, so I sink into his side as he guides me quietly towards our junkyard.

"Well, I hope you can find someone nice, Duo."

I sulk. I really hated that girl comment.

"Who won’t pull your hair."

I sulk harder.

"I hope you do better than me," Solo warns affectionately, rubbing my shoulder. "No matter if they’re an asshole." He laughs.

My memory fades out quickly, a delightful little sight patched in in its place. Confident that I’m still chewing and gazing at my tray in deep reflection, Heero is fidgeting almost gracelessly with my black shades, unknowingly under voyeuristic eyes.

He hates them. I love it.

He’s also staring balefully at some cumbersome old guy shoving the hamburger into his mouth like it’s about to struggle and run away, fingering the thin black rim over his nose. Furrowing his eyebrow. Arching his lip. Gagging Wolf, revisited in all its glory. I’m sipping out of my paper cup again, intermittently going through my assorted foods while I watch him, and I smile against the straw. Almost like he’s about to whip out his gun and fire the damned meat out of them man’s hand and proceed to ‘Dirty Harry’ the thing to death.

Shoot hamburgers first, ask questions later.

He’s cute when he wants to kill.

I know better than be caught and I’m again digging into my breakfast as he turns back. Nothing seems to please him in this place, it seems. Thin, aggravated lines dash between his eyebrows as I shove some mushy hash browns into my mouth. Always room. I’m glancing up at him between his intense, incensed glares at me, then his intense, incensed glares at my food, and his intense, incensed glares at aforementioned Grubby Guy. It’s actually quite easy to space them and find moments to watch him without getting burned by the ferocity of his eyes. I know him so well. Well, at least for today. Lately, I don’t know just general.

He’s like a brand new horse with old age arthritis or something. Yeah, that mystifying.

Or at least a pitcher.

Egg McMuffin. Warm and mashed in my mouth, followed instantly by a dashing of cold orange pop and a poor substitute for orange juice, followed by more plastic meat and muffin.

A baseball pitcher.

Grudgingly, I watch with baited eyes as Heero snatches up his coffee cup and watch the burning steam practically rise from his fingers as the hot porcelain fries them.

A hot baseball pitcher.

There’s black dirt in his knuckles. Standard of soldier boy.

A hot, dirty baseball pitcher.

Grease from 01’s intricate innards. Stolen innards.

A hot, dirty baseball pitcher, robbing me blind.

Although I hated to admit, my Heero persuasion skills sadly do have their limit, and it was the inability to disarm him in a McDonald’s that smashed my nose into the cement. And ground it in. You know, a few times for good measure. I can hear the sound of his shoulder holster moving ever so slightly under his jacket and militant green tank top.

A hot, dirty baseball pitcher, robbing me blind, killing the ump on the side.

I laugh at that thought. I laugh. Visibly at him. Oh crap.

He’s now staring at me, despised sunglasses in pocket, all his baleful contempt for this place of cheap, over-salted hell directed at me in a little package called a death glare. Blazing blue. Hey, what did I ever do deserve it for? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever know. I just know I’m in for a bomb of some sort as I purse my lips around the straw and cut off the laughter almost violently.

A hot dirty baseball pitcher robbing me blind, killing the ump, and aiming flaming curveballs straight at my face.

Oh right.

I dragged him here in the first place.

As I look up to his face, my own maw stuffed with half-chewed warm, yellowish, greenish scrambled eggs, I realize just how pissed off he is. No problem. I think.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death….

"Hey, what’s up, Hee-chan?"

Oh shit. I can hear blood vessels bursting and screaming in pain as his eyebrows dig furiously together faster than his trigger finger annihilates an Oz soldier.

Heero, it’s Heero! I meant Heero! NO! I didn’t just do that!

Leather swishes against green tank top fabric with the faint metallic ping of a fully loaded and fully operational gun to boot. Something blue darkens. Oh, yeah. Those are my companion’s pretty blue eyes, I think dreadfully in the haze that is now my panicky brain, not the hateful glare of a demon. My fingers clench around my orange pop. I also think, when did I become such a pant-pisser?

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death… God damn it, what’s the last part again?

"Duo."

I don’t dare answer. My orange-flavored lips glue fiercely together.

Yea, though I… Yea, though I…

I’m staring wide-eyed at his tanned, cute little mulatto-Asian face, soaking in the charismatic glow his emotionless blue eyes radiate, and I’m sure I’m going to be injured once we step foot away from any possible witness to my bloody slaughter. I’m melting from the spite he reeks.

Yea, though I… Yea…

"…Yeah…Heero?"

"Outside. Now. We’re leaving." He snorts condescendingly, abandoning his plain coffee, steaming into the yellow-tinted air, as he disappears from my fearful line of sight. I gaze at the rain-splattered window, muddled with a hazy grey, sluggish sky, until I finally realize I’m not in pain or dead yet, which is a surprise, estimating from just how royally angry he was when I dragged him here. Angry, at cheap American junk food. Angry, of an absent mission. Angry, at me. Angry, at me for dealing with it so casually. Angry, that the only obscuring article of clothing I had to hide his identity from possible recognition or attack was my sunglasses. Angry, at Shinegami.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death…

Everything again blurs. I hate it when that happens. But it always does. When I follow Heero, watching the muscles tense in his back for an attack, or just putting up an indifferent, levelheaded façade, everything around me is gone. No world. Just me, and him, a soldier. There is no mundane happy life, no fleeting moments of childhood to snatch out of the air, the intangible, fleeting flow of life. It all just dies and rots around little oblivious, godly me... An inevitable evil, I muse ironically and briefly think about the cold metal of my cross necklace against my chest.

Indistinct colors and blurs and cool mists and winds that claw at the outside of me numbly just hang limply around me, dead, floating in the water. Warm, sluggish peach-colored blurs shift mill around me—people. I mechanically stand and dispose of the garbage, before I slink noiselessly out the door, an anonymous gray shadow of Shinigami.

The rain is really cold today. And so is Heero.

So. No. Big. Difference.

…I shall fear no evil…

Slicked with rain, he stares at me, blue eyes flat and misty in the gray light, quiet and stoic and dependable as always, maddening and perversely enchanting as always. The slim brunette is poised, commandeered car door ajar, like a flesh figurine. Sometimes I think I know him, I think with a dull arbitrary grin that aches on my face. Soaked, my sneakers slush of their own accord through the puddles toward him, taking me with.

…for…

Heero looks at me, and then slides effortlessly into the driver seat.

…I am…

Inside, it’s frigid. The rain streaks like tears, swallowing the glass up. I buckle up and draw a barbed glance from my comrade for it. Neutral. That’s what I am back to him. I only wanted to have a moment of life with Heero, with any other living, breathing thing, outside of the swirling black sand trap that is this prideful, bloated war and my warped life. The only reason I felt so happy was because I felt so small and average, just eating cheap breakfast with my friend.

Heero snorts, displeased with the drained expression I cling to, and looks away distantly, jerking the car out of neutral and into drive, but I’m still stuck.

…the meanest son of a bitch in the valley…

In neutral, with him.

That’s the way it has to be.

…I am Shinigami…