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Peanuts, Walnuts, and Pecans, Oh My!
     ~ A Moment in a Dorm Room ~
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	"Hey, d'ya mind?"

	Heero shouldn't have been startled.  He'd heard the toilet 
flush, after all.  He just hadn't registered its significance, nor had 
he been on alert, for he had not considered himself to be engaged in any 
wickedly clandestine operation.  He looked away hastily from the drawing 
on Duo's desktop.  It had been lying in plain sight, however, so Duo 
really had no right to complain.  "It just caught my eye."

	Duo crossed his arms in a huff and waited for Heero to finish 
his journey to the other side of his desk, where he had left his 
backpack.  When the way was clear again, Duo stalked over to his desk 
and plopped grumpily back into the chair.

	"You really don't like the doctors," Heero observed mildly, 
taking his time with rummaging through his pack.

	Duo reached out and flipped closed the notebook that had been 
kindly provided by the doctors.  "Their fault for trying to get us to do 
this journal crap.  They wanna know my thoughts and feelings?  Sure, 
I'll tell 'em what I think about their stupid assignment."

	"You could just leave it blank."  His own was clean and bright 
and white and very much unopened.

	Duo snorted derisively.  "Why leave it blank when I can doodle 
something offensive?  It'd be such a waste of paper, otherwise."

	Finished with tucking his homework away into his backpack, Heero 
returned to his desk, sitting at a slight offset to achieve an angle 
whereby he could observe his offbeat roommate.  He made no efforts to 
hide it, too.

	At length, Duo snapped.  "What?"

	Heero maintained his silent scrutiny for another five seconds 
before he shrugged slightly.  "You put so much effort into something 
that is entirely unnecessary."

	"Seem 'inefficient' to you?" Duo sneered in response.

	He shrugged again.  To each his own, and all that.  He was no 
longer surprised that the rest of the world was impractical, irrational, 
and inefficient.  "Putting that much effort into something generally 
implies some level of attachment or interest."

	Duo's hand spasmed on top of his journal, and with a decisive 
action, he flipped it open to a random page, tore it out, crumpled it 
up, and threw it at his roommate, then mentally cursed the relatively 
poor aerodynamic qualities of paper as it fell before ever making it to 
Heero's desk.  "Some days, I swear you're on their side, Yuy.  You talk 
like one of them."

	It could have been a deadly insult, but Heero took it as a 
statement of fact.  "I'm not unfamiliar with the theories that motivate 
them."

	"Oh, don't tell me that was a part of your training."

	There was a suspicious silence from Heero's side of the room.

	Duo smacked his forehead with his palm.  "Please, *please* don't 
tell me that J thought that *counseling* of all things would make you a 
happy, well-adjusted psychotic terrorist."

	Another suspicious silence.

	"Oh.  My.  Fucking.  God.  J was even more of a crackpot than 
you are, Yuy!  No wonder you're so messed up."

	"It's not as stupid as it sounds."

	"At least I can blame the system for being stupid!  It only 
makes sense that some twisted sort of social service thing would bring 
me to a shrink, but what the hell is a mad scientist's excuse?"

	"Barton told him to."

	Duo laughed loudly at the notion.  "Barton.  Barton was actually 
worried about your mental health."

	Sort of.  "Barton wasn't pleased with... my character, and he 
told J to fix it."

	He laughed again, only darker this time.  "Somehow, I doubt he 
meant counseling."

	"J decided to interpret his orders liberally," Heero answered 
dryly, feeling an odd surge of gratitude towards his kooky mentor.  "He 
was a mad scientist, after all.  How many mad scientists actually do 
exactly what they're told?  They do only what they need to do to 
maintain funding, because it serves their purpose to do so."

	That struck a chord in Duo, making him think about Prof. G.  He 
wondered if the rest of the scientists were just as strange, and then 
wondered if perhaps the strangest scientists had produced the strangest 
pilots.

	"So you've seen a shrink before?" Heero asked.

	It didn't matter how casually it was spoken.  Duo didn't react 
with an equal nonchalance.  "Not by my own choice, thank you very much.  
Useless pricks."

	"What for, then?"

	"You first."

	While it was not Heero's natural tendency to be forthcoming with 
information, he felt the phrasing to be a promise that Duo would 
reciprocate.  "...A lot of people died that shouldn't have.  You?"

	"...A lot of people died that shouldn't have."  There was enough 
of hesitance at the beginning of the response to make it clear that it 
was no mere echo.  The trailing silence more than hinted of gravity.

	Testosterone could make a person stupid sometimes.  The alpha 
male pissing contest thing was quite a burden.  Duo found himself 
strangely wanting to swap notes with his roommate to see whose story was 
more tragic.  His life sucked.  It just didn't seem right to think that 
Heero's might have sucked even more.  Heero was Heero.  He wasn't 
supposed to have a tragic backstory.

	They went back to their work for a few uneasy minutes until Duo 
decided that he needed to say something before he burst out with some 
ridiculously competitive challenge.  "Were they useful?"

	It was a while before Heero answered.  "Enough for Barton to 
feel his orders had been followed."

	"More useful than any shrink I've ever met, then."

	"What were their goals?"

	"Hm?"

	"I've found that our current set of doctors are particularly 
useless because their goals and ours don't overlap much at all."

	Duo's first thought was that their goal had obviously been to 
drive him mad, but no, that probably wasn't quite accurate.  "I don't 
care what their goals were.  There really isn't much you can say that 
will make that sort of thing feel any better."

	"No... There isn't."

	"They actually succeed in 'adjusting your character'?" Duo asked 
with a certain morbid curiosity.  That was another thing he didn't like 
about shrinks.  They were always trying to change a guy.

	There was another long silence before Heero answered.  "That 
wasn't their goal.  If it had been, if Barton had had his way, then 
using shrinks would definitely not have been the way to attain it."

	"Then what did they do?"

	"They didn't do anything.  I knew what had to be done.  I did it 
myself."

	There was no reason for a cold tingle to run down Duo's spine.  
No reason at all.  "No one to blame but yourself, eh?  That must suck."

	"Blame for what?"

	"For..."  He shook his head.  He obviously hadn't changed his 
mind.  It was more an acknowledgment that he shouldn't have said 
anything in the first place.

	"There's something to be said for self-reliance," Heero said, 
finding some sort of irony in saying that to any Gundam pilot.  "I 
certainly would have been in a bit of trouble if I needed someone to 
talk me through my mistakes."

	"Mistakes...?" Duo echoed softly to himself.  He thought about 
for a few seconds before casting an open look at his roommate.

	Heero scratched at his arm with sorrowful rue.  "Nothing like 
blowing up the wrong shuttle to put your world back in perspective."

	And subsequently self-destructing might have had a little 
something to do with it, Duo thought.  "Do they try and get you to talk 
about it a lot?"

	Heero shrugged a bit of the gloom away.  "Sometimes.  It's 
something easy for them to latch on to."  Some wounds didn't need to be 
opened time and time again.  Scars were good; they were reminders.  But 
until the scar tissue formed, he knew better than to keep picking at the 
scabs.

	"They ask me about Trowa sometimes," Duo shared with a tiny, 
mirthless laugh.  "'How did you feel when your fellow pilot destroyed 
your suit?'"  He made a sour face.  What was the point of the question, 
really?  He was pretty sure it wasn't one of their goals to drive the 
five of them apart.  Even if they wanted him to rat on his roommate, it 
wasn't specifically their goal to break them up, despite that being a 
result.

	"What do you tell them?"

	"That it wasn't fair I never got the chance to return the 
favor."

	"You really think so?"

	"Well, that's not the only thing I feel.  And I certainly don't 
go out of my way to tell them everything, either.  I'd end up having to 
put up with even more shit from them."

	And certainly, there was much shit to be had.  "How do you feel 
about Trowa?" he asked curiously.

	Duo let out a short laugh.  "I understand the whole 'undercover' 
thing, but... shit, man, he blew up my suit.  I'm not just going to be 
cool with that."  He paused, then laughed again, this time a little more 
heartily.  "I was just about to say, how would *you* feel if someone 
blew up your suit?  But then I realized that *you* were the one that 
blew up your suit with your little boom, so I guess it's not nearly the 
same thing, is it?"

	Heero snorted.  No, not the same thing at all.  "I didn't want 
to," he said abruptly, his voice soft.  Duo blinked in harsh surprise 
for a moment, but then Heero continued.  "Wing was a fine piece of 
engineering."

	His faith in the world restored, his perception of the universe 
suddenly proven correct, Duo howled with wild laughter, ignoring Heero's 
puzzled look.  "What?" Heero finally asked.

	Duo let his amusement wind down with a relaxed sigh.  "Man, you 
crack me up sometimes, Yuy."

	Perhaps he was merely attempting to assert once more that 
Deathscythe Hell had been a superior machine? Heero thought, dismissing 
the inexplicable hysteria with a mental shrug.  "And you call *me* the 
'nutjob'," he muttered.

	"Eh, don't worry 'bout it, Yuy.  We're both nuts.  I just like 
pointing it out more often than you do."

	"And how does that make you feel?" Heero said back with a 
completely deadpan tone.  He decided to add a faintly wry look to his 
face, just in case Duo looked over at him and got the impression that 
Heero had been serious.  They were able to live in peace and harmony 
mostly because they felt they were on the same side.  He would not 
disturb that balance lightly, despite Duo's sometimes paranoid 
suspicions to the contrary.

	Duo did look, and was reassured he wasn't living with a total, 
irredeemable nut that needed to be crushed.  "Hey, I like nuts."  He 
paused, considering what he had just said, then immediately prepared for 
an offensive.  By making the jokes himself, he could spare himself the 
trouble of being the punchline of the naughty jokes.  He stopped himself 
before continuing crudely, however.  This was Heero he was talking to.  
Chances were, any ulterior definitions of 'nut' had not occurred to his 
straightlaced roommate, thus making it very unnecessary for him to 
devolve into such juvenile posturing.  He exhaled in relief.  Freedom to 
act like a teenage guy was nice, but the freedom to not act like a 
teenage guy sometimes was just as nice.

	Of course, now he had to find something else to say.  "Say, if 
you were a nut, what kind of nut would you wanna be?"

	"I thought I was a nut, no conditionals attached."  Heero sat 
blandly through Duo's attempt to glare 'I meant literally!' at him.  At 
length, he shrugged.  "I don't know much about nuts."

	Duo refrained from commenting on his roommate's undoubtably poor 
acquaintance with his personal set of nuts, covering the comeback with a 
small cough.  "Uh, well there's peanuts... walnuts... um..."  Nuts 
weren't really a part of his spotty education, either.

	"Pecans?"

	"Ooh, tricky, going with something that ain't called a nut."

	A nut was a nut.  Even if the two of them, being nuts, weren't 
really nuts.  "Hm.  What do peanuts grow on, you think?"

	Duo blinked.  Not a tangent he would have considered worth 
pursuit.   Heero had the strangest interests, sometimes.  "Uhm... no 
clue."

	Heero was already typing a search query into his laptop.  "Hm.  
A short plant whose stalks bend over so that the seed pods ripen 
underground.  Interesting.  Also called the earthnut, goober, groundnut, 
or monkey nut."

	Duo burst out in laughter at the last alias, but quickly muffled 
it into a snuffle-snort.  Could it be that crude, juvenile male came 
naturally to him?  And was that something to be proud of?  Upon further 
consideration, however, he had to concede that the Sweepers had often 
acted the part of little boys, too, so perhaps such things and 
associations were neither here nor there.

	When Heero arched another questioning look at him, he just waved 
it off with a negligent hand and tried to carry on.  "Uhm... almonds?"



_________________________________________
This piece of fiction is the intellectual 
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The basis for this fic, i.e. Gundam Wing, 
Kyuuketsuki Miyu, et al., is the property 
of someone else.  The author can be con-
tacted at jchew at myrealbox.com.  This 
has been an entirely automated message.
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jchew/misc/gw.html

last modified : 4/30/2005 00:20:03 PST