September 7, 2001
pairing: 2+1
notes: duo pov. mild angst. strangeness. tangents.
We eat dinner from a map of the Vatican City. The grease stains from his pizza expand slowly in a cloud of diluted orange, spreading towards the Sistine Chapel. Heero asks me if I've ever seen the inside of it, and I say no, but add that I'd like to take him there sometime. I would have promised, but the Sistine Chapel was bombed early into the war. I have a cherubic eye, a splinter of the ceiling, in the cockpit of Deathscythe.
There are a lot of things I would like to do with Heero. I know he'd let me do them, too. It's kind of strange, looking at his face in the streetlight that seeps into our basement turned safehouse, and knowing that if I wanted to, I could plant kisses on his face and push him onto the cold floor and he wouldn't stop me. He wouldn't say no, and maybe he'd kiss back and wiggle his hips under mine and let me know that he liked it. If he did, maybe that would give us a base to start from after the war; I could point to tonight as a reason and say _But you... _ and he could say _So maybe if we..._
I know that I used to think about sex in terms of stages, as separate frames of experience rather than a film. It wasn't even bases or letters; it was just one of those things, taken for granted that I would get to ease in slowly, as if it were a drawn bath of steaming water.
It doesn't seem so odd to think of having sex with Heero. Maybe, I think, looking around the room at the emptiness of the walls, the conspicuous absense of furniture, it's just one of those things you _do_. Maybe it doesn't mean anything; the importance it does have, we've given it out of our own ignorance, our own fear.
He slides the crusts of his pizza back into the small box. We couldn't scrape together enough money for a large; neither of us had any substantial amount of cash on us. It looks pretty suspicious nowadays when a kid my age pays with a credit number. Even the rich are tugging their belts a notch tighter.
"You nervous?" I say, somehow glad that he's finished eating before me, glad that he's eaten more than I have. It's odd, perhaps a bit masochistic, but I don't think about it too much. Maybe it's like sex in that respect.
Maybe thinking is just dangerous.
The smells of thick musk and dust; my nose itches the way it does before a sneeze, though nothing comes of it. I pretend that I can hear his heart beating slowly behind the venetian blinds of his ribs. The rough cloth of my pants chafes my skin quite suddenly; I want to stand up and kick them off, but I don't dare. Not while he's here. Not while he's here to get the wrong impression.
And I guess that it's all because I can't decide whether I like being in a safehouse by myself or what. When you're not with a partner, you can be as gross and disgusting as you want. You can mop up the sweat under your arms with paper towels and no one, not even the possible rodent population in the wall, cares. You can spit and hock mucus and you can sleep with your pants off.
"Not really," he says, a bit hesitantly, and I start. I don't even remember having asked him a question, which is bad. I should be taking advantage of the situation, savoring my time with him. We don't get a lot of downtime; not that this is downtime, but I can't stop thinking about the way his shirt bunches around his waist, the lines of his muscles, criss-crossing with his rib cage and maybe some scars. Yes, I think, it's only right that he has scars. Nothing perfect could be so beautiful.
"I am," I say, finishing my pizza with a lick of my fingers. "I don't like flying blind."
"It's only for ten miles," he says, moving to the window. He stares out absently. The tires of the car are at eye level.
"At lot can happen in ten miles," I say, and now I sound nervous, now I sound uncertain. I want to be perfectly self-assured for him, cool and collected enough to set off any of his own doubts. I don't want him to have doubts. I want him to be serene and confident. Even though I hate him a little for being so close to perfection, so mechanical in his actions, sometimes I need to have blind faith, and I want it from Heero.
Other times, I look at him and see a little boy, and he couldn't seem anymore imperfect than a cracked diamond. I remember a story about a king who had a large diamond that suddenly sprouted a flaw overnight. He had all the jewelers in the land try to fix it, but in the end, it was the one who used the crack as the stem of a rose carving that won the king's favor. I don't think of myself as royalty, and Heero's certainly not a diamond, however rough, but maybe, maybe...
"You'll be fine," he says, looking at the floor. His back is slumped just enough to make me think that he wants to go to sleep, that he's sick with exhaustion. "You'll be fine," he says again. I wonder which one of us he's trying to convince.
He uses the tip of his boot to scratch his calf. The moon curve of it makes my throat ache and my lungs burn, as if the air has combusted and turned to pure heat inside them. I stand, aware of my own bare feet, and touch his shoulder.
His skin is perfectly smooth, devoid of blemishes or moles. We stand there for a long moment, trying to absorb the light into our skins, my hand on his skin like my hands on his bare body, touching. I kiss his dark, thick hair once.
"We should sleep," I say, and he nods.
We lie down on the cold cement, not touching. I watch him breathe. The slender line of his spine is visible to me even in the dark.
End
[1] Inspiration for the story from "la playa", a song by la oreja de
van gogh from their newest cd, el viaje de copperpot. The title is a
line from the song.
[2] This story made sense in my head. I swear.
Bianca
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