---------------------------
        Four Percent
~ A Moment in a Dorm Room ~
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	It'd been a while since Duo had last tried.  A few weeks, maybe.  
He'd thought it was just a fluke before.  Maybe he'd just been feeling 
down and out of sorts.  Maybe there'd just been other things going on at 
the time.  Maybe it was just the wrong people at the wrong time.

	But no, the feeling was persistent.

	He got back to the room as grumpy as ever, and it was just that 
'wrong person at the wrong time' thing that placed his roommate in the 
way of that grumpiness.

	When Duo came in, Heero was standing in that space between their 
two desks, attending to some business that would soon be forgotten.  It 
was the middle of the room, and Duo had to get past him on the way to 
his own side.  His passage with accomplished with a peculiar lack of 
grace, and a distinct apathy towards the concept of personal space.

	Heero frowned, eyes taking in the figure that passed him so 
brusquely.  "Take off your shoes," he said automatically, once noting 
that Duo had failed to do so.

	They'd agreed to a number of strange things when moving into the 
room together.  Though not influenced by cultural practices or even long 
standing habit in this case, they were motivated by the mutual desire to 
give the dorm's cleaning lady as little reason as possible to spend much 
time in their room.  The first time she had knocked requesting entrance, 
they'd both been... a little jumpy.  Her every weekly visit was an 
awkward thing for them as they studiously and clandestinely observed her 
every action within their safe haven.  She didn't notice.  They'd even 
managed to figure out when it was she made her rounds and planned 
whenever possible for one of them to be in the room, or to make sure 
everything was put away before she arrived.

	Duo spun around when he heard his roommate speak.  "Oh, shove 
it, Yuy."

	That was interesting.  "What crawled up your ass and died?" he 
responded with little inflection, parroting back a phrase Duo had used 
the other day on a classmate.  It seemed appropriate for this situation.

	He was sadly mistaken.  For Duo, depression came only after 
anger.  A volatile, indiscriminate anger that was, fortunately, not 
entirely blind and stupid.  He didn't punch Heero.  He pushed, his 
intentions clearly telegraphed in the action.

	Heero had himself braced for impact, and after he absorbed the 
force of it, he evaluated his options in the blink of an eye and pushed 
back.  From his stance, Duo seemed to be expecting it.  Heero was 
willing to oblige.  He didn't let people push him around without being 
answered.

	The gauntlets thrown, the testosterone piqued, it wasn't long 
before push came to shove and it was a very good thing that there was a 
decent amount of clear space between their two sides of the room, and an 
even better thing that they had no intent to harm.  With an amateurish 
tackle, Duo plowed into Heero until they hit the edge of Heero's bed, 
and then they bounced to the floor in an organized jumble of hands 
searching for a grip, arms looking for a hold, legs flailing for a lock.  
Heero's calves and shins were banged around a bit by Duo's steel-toed 
boots.  Duo collided at various angles with his dresser.  It was a, uh, 
'friendly' match that lasted about half a minute before a strange smile 
on Heero's face brought Duo to a confused halt, poised on the brink of 
possibly pinning his roommate to the floor.

	It was a 'Look at us.  This is kind of funny, don't you think?  
I mean, granted, my sense of humor can be somewhat odd at times, but 
come on, you gotta admit there's something amusing about us rolling 
around on the floor like a couple of, well, stupid teenage boys, which 
has a quaint humor all its own.' sort of look.

	Heero was very communicative with his significant looks 
sometimes.

	Wrinkles appeared across Duo's brow, and Heero's amusement 
erupted in outright laughter.  The furrows deepened, but then Duo, too, 
began to see the odd... irony?  Humor?  Absurdity?  Whatever it was, it 
was odd enough to warrant an equal measure of laughter from him, at the 
very least.  The idea of Heero outlaughing him suddenly inspired him to 
greater heights of mirth, and he rolled off to the side on the floor 
beside his roommate, laughing until he could have cried, if he was 
disposed towards that sort of thing.

	When the last chuckles were fading, Heero posed a question.  
"Gonna take off your boots yet?"

	"Oh, fuck off, Yuy," he answered half-heartedly, not 
particularly interested in getting up.  After a moment's consideration, 
he lifted his legs, bent at the knee, and untied his laces, then dropped 
them back down to toe off the offending shoes.  Once off, he kicked them 
negligently across the room towards the front door.  Heero winced 
internally when one of them smacked into the wall with a thud.

	They lay their in contemplative silence, both bruises and 
laughter forgotten.  Though their thoughts were directed inwards, Duo 
mused aloud.  Beating up on each other was perhaps a bonding experience.  
"Ever wonder if we'll ever be 'normal'?"

	"No," Heero answered without needing to put thought into the 
matter.  The answer was obvious.  "We'll never be 'normal'.  We can 
pretend, though."

	"How much effort does that take, you think?"

	Heero shrugged his shoulders against the rough, institutional 
carpet.  It chafed against a patch of skin already feeling the burn from 
earlier friction.  "Practice makes perfect?"

	"Think we can ever get so good at pretending that it becomes 
natural?"

	"Yes."  For better or for worse.

	"Think... maybe you're already naturally pretending something 
else?"

	That one took thought.  It was hard to say.  After it became 
falsely natural, could one even question it any further?  What had he 
started out as?  Looking over the pages of his past, he could see how he 
grew into the roles he had filled, but never without the force of 
everything he was behind it.  "No."

	"Huh."  Though he didn't say as much with the one sound, it was 
probably understood that Duo had meant it with contrast, that he didn't 
think the same was true for him.  Kids had to do a lot of posturing to 
survive, and it had to be real to work.  He didn't look too deeply into 
his own patterns of behavior, however.  It wasn't healthy.  "I tried 
hanging out with some of the guys again tonight.  It... didn't feel 
right."

	Heero, though he didn't follow the same path, wasn't entirely 
unsympathetic to Duo's cause.  "Try different guys next time."

	"They're normal guys, Heero."

	"We're not."

	"That's the point."

	Heero chose to take a more practical, statistical approach to 
the problem.  "Assuming a standard Gaussian distribution for the 
definition of 'normal', only sixty-eight percent of the population falls 
within one standard deviation of the center.  You're measuring your 
progress by the center when in reality, you can be two or even three 
standard deviations away from the center in either direction and still 
be considered within the normal distribution."

	"I think we're a little farther than that," Duo answered, ready 
and willing to disagree with his roommate.  "Even at three, we'd have to 
assume that four percent of everyone was in the same general bracket as 
us.  Even with the war..."

	"I don't think fitting in with four percent of the population is 
too much of a reach for us.  We're smart.  We're adaptable."

	"True, true."  He was hardly going to disagree on that, 
especially if 'fitting in' could involve just pretending.  He switched 
to cynicism instead to counter the Heero menace.  "And already we've got 
five down.  Just need to find another, oh, three hundred sixty million 
people?  Minus five?"

	Heero snorted.  "With the five of us together, we're allowed to 
meet another one hundred twenty people who are closer to normalcy than 
we are."

	"Actually," Duo started, warming to the subject.  "We're all 
deviant in the same direction, so really, we're just two percent, which 
means we can meet another two hundred forty people who are normal-er 
than us."

	"And five who are as far from normal as we, just on the other 
side of the curve."

	"And we're assuming a flat, two-D curve, which, with the 
complexity of the human personality, is really inadequate, so... the 
rest of the four percent could really be nothing like us and still exist 
within our deviation bracket."

	"Aa."

	"And one standard deviation could be really big."

	"Aa."

	"So really, to pass as normal... we don't have to be much like 
anyone else at all, do we?"

	"Aa."

	"Huh."  The revelation was as mind-blowing as it was liberating.  
Duo took a few moments to step back and admire it.  Then he reassured 
himself that he had actually arrived at that conclusion by himself, with 
only a few Heero grunts to assist him.  "I've always been partial to the 
Gauss rifle, myself."

	Heero handled the change of subject with a remarkable degree of 
equanimity.  The statistical ramifications of the bell curve as it 
related to their current situation had mostly played out, anyway.  "Coil 
guns are remarkable devices," he agreed.

	"Gauss is a pretty handy guy to have around."

	Snort.

	Duo spent a few moments trying to interpret the meaning of that 
wry sound, then gave it up as a lost cause.  The swirls in the stucco of 
the ceiling yielded no useful answers as well.  "You didn't correct 
McMahon today when he misapplied that formula."

	"Neither did you.  Or the other ninety-six percent of the 
class."

	"Yeah, but we're not as anal as you are."

	"I don't sit in class to be anal, Duo."  He had long since 
ceased to protest Duo's application of the term.

	A thoughtful silence.  "Why *do* we sit in class?  I mean, 
government watchdogs aside.  Are we getting anything out of it?"

	"Supposedly."

	Duo took that as a 'no'.  "Are we getting anything out of any of 
this?"  His hand rose lazily and gestured at the world around them.  
"You think any of this is going to help us live out there?"

	Heero took his time in answering, absently noting that the floor 
was not a particularly comfortable surface on which to lie.  At least 
they could be sure it was reasonably clean.  "I don't think physics 
class itself will help us, or this school, or being surrounded by other 
young people.  But I think..."  He hesitated briefly, wary of sharing 
too much of his personal theories.  As Quatre had said, however, the 
five of them had to trust each other.  "I think being somewhere with 
some sort of purpose, no matter how specious, or perhaps because of that 
speciousness... I think that will help."

	"For a few months?  What are you gonna do once we get out of 
here?" Duo asked challengingly.

	"I think these few months are meant to give us time to figure it 
out."

	"I coulda done that anywhere."

	"Yes, but..."  He didn't want to sound like he supported the 
program too much, but he still wanted to justify his own position.  "The 
way I see it, yes, we could be anywhere, but if we were, we'd have to 
figure out where.  We'd have to concern ourselves with shelter, food, 
supplies.  We're all very capable of taking care of that, of course, but 
it wouldn't leave as much time to figure anything out.  All that time 
during the war that we didn't spend thinking about what we'd do if we 
won, I see this as making up for it.  Being at a school is just 
something to do with our bodies."

	Duo's answering laugh held a derisive edge.  "Heh, you really 
think the uniforms thought all that?"

	"No.  But I don't really care what they think."  His tone sort 
of implied, 'Or you, for that matter.'  "This is just a place to wait 
things out."

	"Purgatory," Duo labeled it, putting his own spin on things.  He 
chuckled darkly.  "If this is purgatory, then put me on the first train 
to hell."

	"Why hell?"

	Duo turned his head to face him incredulously.  "What, you don't 
actually think heaven is a viable option, do you?"

	Heero kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.  "Reincarnation?"

	The idea filled Duo with more mocking laughter.  "What, think 
next time, you'll have a go at being the anti-Christ?  How much farther 
you really wanna fall on your next turn on the wheel?  It ain't about 
second chances, you know."

	"It isn't about becoming a worse person than you were last, 
either.  'Falling' is meant to teach humility, and if supreme arrogance 
is being one person with a Gundam thinking that he might actually 
accomplish something, and then having the arrogance on top of that to 
actually succeed... then I wouldn't mind a go at humility."

	This didn't seem the appropriate time to agree with him on what 
an arrogant bastard he often was.  Exercising a touch of humility, 
perhaps?  "...Humility, huh?"  An interesting idea.



_________________________________________
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Kyuuketsuki Miyu, et al., is the property 
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http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jchew/misc/gw.html

last modified : 10/18/2004 00:26:22 PST