06-Jan-2005
Title: Res Gestae
Author: Mookie
Pairing: Heero/Duo
Rating: PG
Word count: A mere 1,226
Warnings: shonen ai, got the idea when I was at the dentist's...
Heero's eyes narrowed as the object neared his face, and his lips turned down in the corners.
"Come on," Duo coaxed. "Just try a bite."
"What is it?"
"You're kidding me, right? It's a BombPop!"
"That explains why it looks like a rocket." His face betrayed no appreciation for the appropriateness of the name.
"So just take a bite already."
Heero warily opened his mouth and sucked on the end of the frozen treat, coming away with his lips tinted red while Duo shook his head. "A bite, Heero. While that approach might work well in other endeavors, you're only getting the cherry part that way. You need to chomp on one of the fins."
"There's a procedure for this?"
Duo held the popsicle out to Heero sideways and Heero closed his lips and teeth around the part of the fin where the white lemon met the blue raspberry. He glared at Duo as he felt a tug against his lips when the frozen confection refused to immediately let go.
"Oh, yeah, sorry. It's been a while since that's happened to me. When they're straight out of the freezer sometimes they stick to your mouth."
Heero crunched on the piece in his mouth and winced as he felt the cold permeate his gums.
"Don't tell me you got an ice cream headache just from that little bit," Duo teased, nibbling at the rest of the fin that Heero's teeth had bitten into.
Heero just grunted, running his tongue over the spot where he'd recently discovered a sensitivity to cold. Duo stopped in the act of sucking on the end of the BombPop when he noticed, and his eyes narrowed in concern.
"Are you holding out on me?"
"It's nothing," Heero shrugged.
Duo stared at Heero a bit longer before resuming his eating of the novelty item. He watched Heero walk to the bathroom, wondering exactly what Heero's idea of "nothing" was.
Less than five minutes later the wooden stick was tossed into the garbage and Duo was leaning in the doorway to the bathroom watching Heero floss his teeth.
One of Duo's eyebrows raised when he noticed Heero's eyes close as he worked the floss between his teeth in the approximate region where he'd bitten into the ice pop.
He found himself nearly sputtering in the middle of his sentence as he realized what that look reminded him of, and he beat a hasty retreat.
He saw the same look again the following day as Heero was sitting on the couch watching television. Heero's thumb was moving in small circles around his middle finger. It wasn't until Heero's teeth were visible just enough to indicate he was biting his lower lip when Duo couldn't contain his curiosity any longer.
"What are you doing?"
Heero started when he realized Duo was standing there, looking at him suspiciously. When he remained silent, wondering what the hell Duo was talking about, his roommate walked over and plopped onto the couch next to him, picking up Heero's hand and examining his fingers.
"You, my friend, need a manicure," he said, noting a jagged bit of flesh that had split from the side to the base of Heero's fingernail. He squinted at it, noting that the skin appeared twisted into a tiny spear shape. Duo lightly brushed at the hangnail, hearing a sharp hiss as he did so.
"Hang on," he said. "I'm going to get the clippers." To his surprise Heero didn't protest.
Duo brought back a tube of hand lotion along with the clippers, and he sat and trimmed the skin around Heero's cuticles, warning him that if anyone heard that he'd done this, he'd be sure to use the clippers somewhere that even Heero might regret. When he was done, he squeezed the hand cream into his palm, rubbed his hands together, and kneaded it into Heero's knuckles, spreading it between each finger and all the way to his fingertips. He turned one of Heero's hands over and rubbed both thumbs firmly in the center of Heero's palm.
Heero leaned his head back against the couch and closed his eyes as Duo massaged his hand, biting his lip again when the touch became lighter.
"What does it mean when you do that?"
Heero slit open one eye and turned his head to face Duo. "Do what?"
Duo swallowed. "That thing you do, when you bite into something cold or play with a hangnail."
Heero sat up straighter but didn't pull his hand away. Duo expected him to ask 'what thing' but apparently Heero knew exactly what he was talking about. He shrugged.
"I don't know. Maybe it's true that there is a fine line between pleasure and pain. Not," he hurried to add, "to say that applies to all pain. Just certain kinds, or more specifically, certain places.
"I don't know," he said with another shrug. "Pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong. That's part of the nervous system's job, to communicate that information to the brain. It's just that sometimes it's different. I wouldn't say the same about taking a bullet or breaking a leg."
Duo mulled over that bit of info. "I guess I understand," he said with a slow nod of his head. "Like when you get a mosquito bite, and you scratch it so much it starts to bleed, but it still feels damn good."
Heero chuckled, and Duo smiled back. His fingers continued their stroking motions as he turned Heero's hand back over and brought it closer to his face for inspection.
He looked at the scuffed knuckles and the split cuticles, at the torn fingernail and the small red hollow where he'd removed the hangnail. He lifted Heero's middle finger and drew it between his lips, ignoring the bitter taste of hand cream and slowly rotating his tongue around the tip, poking lightly at the spot that caused Heero to bite his lip. Emboldened, Duo sucked the rest of the digit into his mouth, flicking his tongue between Heero's fingers and belatedly wishing he'd left the lotion in his bedroom.
Heero's eyes met Duo's and a lazy smile graced his features. "Hurts here, too," he said, tapping his elbow. Duo barked in laughter.
"You might remember who was watching that movie with you," he said, leaning forward and placing one hand on the cushion next to Heero. "So I know how it ends."
"Do you?" Heero said nervously as Duo's face hovered over his own.
"I hope so," Duo's words whispered across Heero's lips before they were covered with a warm mouth. Heero resisted the urge to squirm as Duo's tongue probed his mouth, the tip lingering over one particular region where his gums met his teeth.
"What message is being communicated to your brain now?" Duo murmured. He shifted his position so his knee was between Heero's thighs. He threaded his fingers through the back of Heero's hair. The kissing resumed, lips parting and heads tilting, when light pressure against Duo's thigh gave him the answer he was looking for.
As he led Heero to the bedroom, he couldn't help grinning. He fully intended to let Heero know which side of that fine line he stood on.
Heero's hand sliding into the front of his pants let him know that the feeling was more than mutual.
The End
(:./mookie/res)
