04-Nov-2004
Title: Who's Girly?
Author: RurouniTriv
No warnings. No action. No real plot. Just a bit of mild ranting on Duo's part. 2x1 but nothing lemony.
Well, I actually went looking at some of the WIP fics I had sitting on an old floppy, and found this puppy. A rambling, stream of consciousness POV fic told from Duo's viewpoint.
You know what really annoys me?
Having people think I'm a girl.
I mean, really, look at me, people! Yeah, I've got long hair, yeah I wear it in a braid. Long hair, that's my personal statement, made for personal reasons. A braid is just the only way to keep it neat and in control so it doesn't get into shit. You really don't want to get your hair caught in moving machinery or anything like that. It's just a bad thing to have happen. Best you could hope for is to get scalped. Worst... well, I saw somebody who got their hand caught in the gears when we were constructing Deathscythe.
He'd have lost his arm up to the shoulder if he'd lived. It was a messy way to die.
The braid's heavy enough that I always know where it is. I can even use it as a weapon if I want to. Quick snap of the head and I can whip somebody with it, and several pounds of hair hitting you in the head will be noticed, and as long as it is, I can strangle somebody with it.
Sometimes, when I know I'm going into a situation where everybody's going to wind up dead by the time I'm through, I'll weight the end of it so I can really beat the hell out of somebody with it. And if the weight just happens to be a shiv or a set of lockpicks, so much the better. Makes for easier escapes if they manage to catch me.
And hell, yes, I'm a badass. A male badass, thank you very much, as anybody who bothered looking beyond the braid could see. I'll admit that I've got a bit of a baby-face, at least when I'm well-fed, but just look at the jawline, people! Look at the heavy brows! The lack of tits and curvy hips! Hell, look at the 5 o'clock shadow I generally have by 4! I'm lean, I'm agile, but I'm sure as hell not girlish. Big eyes and a braid, that's it. The sum total extent of my femininity.
God knows I don't sound like a girl. My voice broke early, about eleven. I sung baritone in the church choir. People would call the church on the phone and think I was Father Maxwell. I'm just totally un-girl.
But nooooooooo. The minute they see the braid, it's like, "Ignore all male cues, this one's gotta be a girl."
Bullshit. I'm all male.
And when they find out I like guys, well, that just makes it worse. Like my hairstyle determines whether I pitch or catch? Not like they have a right to know, but it's really annoying when they jump to conclusions. Especially since it's usually the wrong conclusion. I happen to prefer to be top.
My itoshii doesn't mind. He kinda likes both ways for different reasons, but most of the time he prefers to just let go, place himself in my hands, and just feel. It's a luxury he doesn't get much outside of our apartment, to be able to relax and let me handle anything that comes up.
...You know, I could make so many jokes around that statement.
Trust is a major turn-on for him. He doesn't let just anyone close. He doesn't leave himself vulnerable if he can avoid it.
Except with me. Me, he trusts. Me, he'll allow to touch and kiss and even tie him up, although we only did that once, after a particularly nasty mission. Even the other pilots have a hard time persuading him to just talk to them. With me, he's darn near a chatterbox. He'll tell me about his day, his last mission, his next mission, politics, Gundam maintenance, and anything else under the sun, anything that caught his eye.
He has a well-developed sense of beauty, did you know that? Not a whole lot of formal training, he can't really tell you who painted what, but he loves color and shape and texture, form, design, and function.
Most people don't realize that. They think he's all "mission, mission, mission" all the time.
He's not. Just most of the time. And since I'm a hell of a lot more mission-oriented myself than most people give me credit for, I'm okay with that. The same focus that makes him obsessive about succeeding in his missions makes our time together more intense than anything I could ever have imagined, because when we're together, his focus is on me. Blew me away the first time we were together that way. I'd thought I'd have to coax him along every step of the way.
Silly me. He might not have been experienced (not that I really had all that much myself), but he knew the mechanics and he was very eager to turn theory into practice. I should have realized that once he decided to do something, he didn't do it halfway.
My itoshii may be many things, but half-assed is not one of them.
So, in any case, when I hear somebody talking about how girly I am, with my long hair, I've been known to point things out.
Like, I have balls. And I got nothing to be ashamed of in the size department, as my itoshii can tell you.
Like, it's not really smart to insult the manhood of one of the five most dangerous people in the world.
Like, of the two of us, my itoshii - who is also on that top-5 list - actually looks more girlish than I do.
Like, one of my best friends, who not only looks more like a girl than me and Heero put together and even sounded like a girl when we were in the war together, racked up the highest body count of all us pilots.
Like, as a duly-appointed officer of the law, I can haul anybody I want in for harassment. And if I find anything, anything at all, that seems even a little hinky, I can keep 'em there for quite a while on suspicion. And most people, if you look hard enough, will have something that can be used. Not that I would, mind you, but I could.
I don't use that particular threat if I can avoid it, though. It reminds me too much of the crap the Alliance soldiers used to pull on us back when I was just another street-rat. Abuse of power is a nasty thing, and it's easy to start sliding down that slope but really hard to stop. Better to just maintain traction in the first place.
Still, every once in a while, it's nice to know that I have the power now. And it's not just me whose voice is being heard a lot clearer now, it's all the people I fought for. The helpless, the hopeless, and the betrayed. Where once they would hold semi-annual snipe-hunts to dispose of us street-rats, now such practices are outlawed in even the poorest and roughest L-2 colonies. Where prostitutes used to dump their aborted fetuses in back-alley dumpsters (and were sometimes dumped themselves when the abortions went wrong), now they're provided contraceptives to keep themselves from getting pregnant to begin with. Where children dumped on the streets once fought like starving dogs over the best garbage cans, now they're (mostly) housed, clothed, and fed. Civilization has hit L-2 like a blast from Wing Zero's buster rifle, and every time I go back to the colony I so hated to call home, I see the effects.
And it makes everything I went through worth it, to be able to say that I had a part in that.
The first time I met Relena, she struck me as a silly little girl who didn't know jack-shit about life. And back then, I was right.
The second time we met, I found myself wondering if she was just stupid, or actively suicidal, to be stalking a boy who had threatened to kill her, and had the means and motive to do it.
By the third time, a lot of the shininess had worn off. She wasn't the innocent who couldn't believe that someone would harm her even while staring down the barrel of Heero's gun. She'd suffered losses. Violence wasn't just an abstract to her any more, nor was death something that only happened to other people. She might still be a princess, but her life was no fairy-tale.
With every time that I saw her, I could see how she'd changed. She was growing up, and damned fast. I went from thinking she was a pest and a stalker to realizing that she was a smart, savvy politician who really might be capable of pulling off the job the world laid upon her shoulders. She just might be able to make this world see that war and oppression were just part of a vicious cycle, and lead us to the breaking of that cycle.
Now Relena, she's girly. And she likes it that way. Heck, I like her that way. She's pretty and proper and very sweet, and very good at getting her way while making a guy think it was all his idea in the first place. That's definitely a girly kind of approach she has to politics: she twists everything around until you realize that what she wants you to do is actually the best way to meet your own goals. Kind of like that old joke with the old man at the wedding, and somebody comments the groom had been chasing the bride through their courtship and the old man says, "Chased her? Oh, yeah, he chased her. Chased her until she caught him!" and then goes into that creaky old-man laughter.
Which reminds me of another thing that annoys me. People thinking just because I like to take things easy and do my best to have a little fun, that I'm just a superficial idiot.
Let me tell you something: no idiot can pilot a mobile suit. Much less a Gundam, and definitely not my Deathscythe. My old partner was the most technically-advanced of all the Gundams, and I knew every system and circuit in that suit. Give me the parts and a shop, and I could build Deathscythe - or any of the other Gundams - in a matter of weeks. Hell, give me the raw materials and the equipment to turn them into parts, and I could do it in less than a year. And I'd improve the design while I was at it. A lot of the differences between Deathscythe and Deathscythe Hell were my ideas for improving my partner's abilities. G may have been the one who implemented them, but I was the one who was doing the piloting and knew the systems best. In a lot of ways, D-Hell was as much my baby as G's.
That's part of the reason that Sandrock and Heavyarms didn't get the upgrades during the war that Deathscythe, Wing and Shenlong did. I can't see Quatre wanting to say anything rude about Sandrock's design - and really, with all the Maguanacs he had for backup he rarely tested Sandrock to the limit the way that the rest of us pushed our Gundams. Plus, he was originally planning on upgrading to Wing-Zero, until that blew up in our faces. And Trowa tends to take what he can get and not bitch about things. I can see him maybe making a comment about how fast he ran through his ammo, but more likely he'd just assume it was his job as pilot to make sure that he didn't run out of ammo before he ran out of targets. I think it's part of that mercenary mindset he's got: he just assumes that what he gets when he takes the job is all he's going to get until the job is done. Which is not to say that he didn't make improvements on his own, but there's only so much you can do without a total redesign.
But me, Heero and Wufei... none of us were shy about letting our docs know what was working, what wasn't working, what could be improved and how. Wufei, for all he's got the most book-smarts of all of us, isn't really all that technically-minded. He prefers more philosophical contemplations, although he's a perfectly competent mechanic. His mind just doesn't quite work the way that mine, Heero's, or Trowa's does.
Heero, on the other hand, is technically minded, but, well... let's just say that creativity isn't his strong point. Oh, he can come up with improvements, but it's always more just refining on what's already there. He'd never have come up with the idea of the Zero System, for example. Not that Zero wasn't a seriously creepy thing that no pilot in his right mind would really want running the show, but it was ingenious of the docs to come up with something like that.
Now me, I'm technically minded, I'm inventive, and I'm anything but shy about letting my needs and desires be known. If you don't ask, you won't get it, y'know? So I ask. Or I just take them, but that's only if I don't think that asking will work. I may not have the book-smarts of Wufei or even Quatre - I didn't even learn to read until I was ten - but I know machines like nobody's business. They make sense to me. A lot more sense than something like politics. I mean, how can you reduce individuals to "the masses"? They're people. They deserve to be treated like people, not like numbers.
At the same time, I can understand how and why they do that. It's the whole "look at the big picture" "do what's best for the majority" kind of idea.
When I was in the gang back on L-2, Solo cut somebody loose. He wasn't pulling his weight, he was sickly, generally he was a drain on the whole gang because we were trying to provide for him when we were just barely scraping by ourselves. Solo gave him a knife and a sandwich and told him not to come back to the hide.
He ate the sandwich and then used the knife on himself. I think Solo knew that would happen. When one of the others griped about how he'd eaten the sandwich, Solo just said, "Can you blame him for wanting to die with a full stomach, when he'd lived all his life with an empty one?"
When you look at it that way, it makes sense. I know I never blamed the kid after he said that.
If I believed in God, I'd thank him for getting me out of that life, for giving me a chance to get others out of it. Since I don't, I'm just really glad that I was able to fight my way free of the streets. Glad that I managed to get myself into a position where I could speak for those who couldn't speak for themselves.
Ah, listen to me rambling. I know I've got a reputation for liking the sound of my own voice, but this is ridiculous and we've both got better things to do than listen to me babble like some old fogey talking about the old days. My itoshii should be here any minute, and I haven't seen him for a week. Should be one heck of a reunion, so... I'll see you another time, ne?
The End
Eh, rather pointless, but what the heck. Hope you enjoyed it!
(:./rt/pov1)
