-----------------------
Maxwell vs. The Machine
 ~ A Moment of Haven ~
-----------------------
	"Now I ask you, babe.  Which one has more sex appeal: me, or 
that computer?"

	Heero perceived the presence behind him only in the way the 
reflection of light from his bedside lamp on his monitor was now 
blocked.  "Do you really want me to answer that?"

	And here he'd thought there was only one possible answer to that 
question.  "Uhm.  All of a sudden, not really."  He made a comical face, 
holding it for a moment before he leaned forward into Heero's field of 
view to mock-glare at him.  Any disapproval was belied by the way he 
ruffled Heero's hair teasingly with one hand.

	"I like my computers, Duo," Heero offered as consolation.  "But 
I don't sleep with them."

	"Well, I suppose they could keep you warm at night," he conceded 
magnanimously.  The key to a good relationship was compromise.

	"But all those cables would complicate things."

	Duo backed off with exaggerated caution.  "Oh, I get it now.  
You like relationships with no strings attached.  I don't think I like 
where this is going."

	With a roll of his eyes, Heero reached out to snag Duo's braid 
and reel him back in again.  "Some strings are rather handy."  Duo 
bumped into the side of his chair, and Heero took the opportunity to 
rest his head against the firm belly thusly present to him.  "You sleep 
with your braid all the time, so which of us is really more deviant, 
hm?"

	Fingers danced through his hair again.  "Wouldn't it be kinda 
freaky if I -didn't- sleep with it?  Like, if it had its own pillow or 
something?  Now *that* would be deviant."

	"Hm.  Perhaps."  Compromise was one thing.  Concession was quite 
another.

	"More than a little 'perhaps'.  So ditch the computer and sleep 
with me, already."  A gentle grip closed on his scalp and shook his head 
back and forth in light rebuke.  "Otherwise I may have to start laughing 
at you again."

	It wasn't as if he'd been with the computer all evening.  And 
though it was closing in on bedtime, it couldn't really be categorized 
as 'late'.  "I didn't laugh when I caught you checking all the fluids in 
the jeep."

	"There's nothing wrong with maintenance."  If Duo hadn't 
performed such stellar maintenance, Heero wouldn't have been able to 
steal such high quality parts, and who would be laughing then?

	"You checked them all last week."

	"The engine was at a different temperature last week," Duo 
explained with patient condescension.  "Besides, you did too laugh."

	"I did no such thing."

	"You slapped my butt.  That's laughing."

	Duo had been leaning in under the hood of their car.  Heero 
really hadn't had a choice.  "I was trying to get your attention."

	"There are other ways to get my attention."

	"That seemed most effective at the time."

	Well, couldn't argue with that.  It had been most effective 
indeed.  Duo didn't recall what the original reason for his summons had 
been, if there had been any at all, but regardless, his attention had 
been seized, through the joking, and then the kissing, with Heero 
pinning his dirtied hands to the wall under the excuse of not wanting to 
get engine gunk on his clothes.  So maybe yeah, Heero's little obsession 
with cleanliness could be a good thing sometimes.  There had been 
something strangely raw about making out to the scent of laundry 
detergent, motor oil, and a bit of sawdust.  The smell of 'garage' had 
always been a comforting one to him.  "Well, I'd slap your butt right 
now, but you're sitting.  But consider yourself slapped."

	"What do you need?"

	"Nothing.  I just wanted to get your attention."

	"I don't think you have it quite yet."

	"I will."  In spite of Heero's pointed return to typing, Duo 
planted a hand on each side of his head and turned his sight away from 
the display, then completed the distraction with a thorough kiss.

	Heero's typing slowed, but did not stop.  He knew what he was 
doing, and let Duo run the show while he finished his thought.  After he 
saved his file, hoping nothing unexpected showed up in it the next day 
-- his concentration was good, but nothing was perfect -- he devoted his 
full resources to Duo, hands shifting from the keyboard to Duo's waist.  
Noting the awkward slant of Duo's back as he leaned down to accommodate 
his partner's height while seated, Heero eased his way out of his chair 
and stood up, nudging the seat out of his way with his foot.  Between 
kisses, he spoke.  "This is only because I reached a good stopping 
point."

	"Mmmm," Duo hummed happily, otherwise occupied with the angle of 
Heero's jaw.  "Whatever you say, babe."

                              ************

	These days, when Duo neared the surface of wakefulness, his gut 
feeling reassured him that all was right with the world, and he snuggled 
back down into sleep quite cozily.  On this night, something twinged.  
Hmm, now what was that?  Ah, yes.  The bed.  After falling into Heero's 
bed at some point, it had seemed far too much trouble to get up and 
relocate to their normal nest, so they'd stayed put and kissed 
themselves to sleep.  The blankets had a different weight to them.  
Probably in large part because they hung off the side of the bed so much 
closer to him than in their wider bed.  The discordant note now 
recognized, he shifted sleepily closer to Heero's side and permitted 
himself to fall back into blissful slumber.

	He didn't.  Something still seemed off.  Grr.  What was it?  
What... what was that sound?  He adjusted his position again, trying to 
locate its source.

	Heero stirred, sensing Duo's change in mood, and gathered enough 
alertness to check up on things.  "Mmmm?"

	Duo rubbed Heero's arm reassuringly, even as he continued to try 
and identify that sound.  It was vaguely familiar.... "Goddammit, 
Heero," he hissed softly.  "What the hell is your hard drive doing?"

	"Mmrph?"  Hard drive?  Why were they talking about hard drives?  
Or was this just one of Duo's strange ways of referring to something?  
Hard drive... what could he mean by 'hard drive'...?  A quick internal 
diagnostic proved that his penis was no longer in the semi-erect state 
in which it had been earlier, so that couldn't be it...  At last Heero 
perceived the noise which had prodded him into wakefulness, and he 
groaned.  Oh.  The hard drive.  "What time is it?  Ch', I think it's 
running regularly scheduled maintenance."

	"Shit, Heero."  Now Duo was grumpy.  "All of them?  That's, 
what, like six of them on three processors?  How the hell do you sleep 
through that?"

	Easily, if someone didn't wake him up.  He shut his eyes tighter 
and tried not to hear it, and willed Duo to not hear it, too, while he 
was at it.  "If I know it's gonna happen, it doesn't wake me up."

	Duo shuffled the blankets around, trying to use them to block 
the sound out, but the hard drives prevailed.  "Can't you... god, send 
some mental rays over there and make them stop or something?"

	That almost made sense in Heero's half-asleep state, except for 
one fatal flaw.  "I haven't perfected that art yet."

	He pulled his pillow into the struggle, too, wrapping it around 
the back of his head and over his ears.  "Argh!"

	Heero sighed.  "I'll go turn it off."

	Duo released the pillow and clamped an arm down over Heero's 
midsection.  "Nooo, the whole point was that you didn't have to get out 
of bed, get it?"

	Not really.  "You going to go turn it off?"  A disdainful sound 
let him know the answer to that.  He yawned.  "Then what do you want to 
do?"

	Heero almost made it back to sleep as they listened to the 
industrious whirring of the drives for a minute before Duo growled.  
"How long before it stops?"

	An accurate estimate would have taken far too long and far too 
much effort, so Heero dredged up a memory or two and settled for a stab 
in the dark.  "Forty-five, sixty minutes?  The tests create a lot of 
temp files..."

	The report ordered on Zero had been completed weeks ago.  Was 
Heero puttering around with something else now, or was the system only 
just getting around to clean-up?  He made a note to himself to ask for 
more information later, just in case Heero 'forgot' to mention something 
else important to him.  Then he went back to whining.  "Argh.  Don't 
wanna wait that long...!"

	Heero exhaled loudly in resignation before turning in place.  
He'd been resting quite comfortably on his back, with Duo at his side, 
but now he heaved himself roughly over to push Duo down flat.  He 
settled his head comfortably by Duo's shoulder, shoving the edge of a 
pillow into the gap between them to buffer one side of Duo's head, and 
moved his hand to cover the remaining ear.  "Here.  Try not to hear it."

	It was, admittedly, nice.  Heero had the habit of sleeping on 
his back because it was most likely to be good for his creaky old joints 
and bones in the largest variety of sleep situations.  This did not 
bother Duo in the slightest, but he had to admit that perhaps something 
about having the one he loved sprawled on top of him appealed to some 
fragment of his masculine pride.  Relucant to do anything to disturb 
them, he tried to do as he was told and ignore the incessant rattle of 
three hard drive heads hard at work.

	He was good at pretending, but he wasn't good enough.  His tiny 
restless shifts alerted Heero to his continuing inability to ignore the 
sound now that he had noticed it, and though the sound was not enough to 
keep Heero similarly on edge, the movement was sufficient to prevent 
more than a light doze.  "Hmm, Duo?"

	"Yeah?"

	"Sleep."

	"I'd love to."  The ceiling witnessed the amused tilt to Duo's 
lips when he heard Heero's incoherent grumble.  He reached up to pull an 
unresisting hand away from what surely was not a very comfortable 
position by his ear and kissed those fingers in apology.  "Don't let me 
keep you up.  I'll just wait it out."

	Even half asleep, Heero wasn't the type to just sit back while 
others suffered.  "I'll distract you," he offered, mumbling the words 
around the lazy nuzzling of Duo's neck.  The nuzzling became random 
open-mouthed kisses.  Those in turn became slow nips.  His mouth wasn't 
really capable of much more than that without further direction from his 
head, which had no intentions of waking enough to provide those 
directions.

	His hand tugged free of Duo's to slip down to his waist, then 
back up again beneath the hem of the shirt of his pajamas.  My, it was 
cozy there.  He let his hand wander as it pleased while he dropped 
kisses down the length of Duo's neck and on down across what skin was 
revealed by the open collar.  When in pursuit of a clavicle, he ran into 
cotton, and frowned displeasedly.  Without having to ask, his hand 
retreated from its leisurely exploration of a nipple to an exterior 
position and started fumbling clumsily with buttons.

	Duo sighed happily, his attention successfully diverted by the 
warm and fuzzy feeling returning to him from earlier.  Though it hit his 
toes, it bypassed his nether regions this time around, but that was 
quite appropriate.  It hit him like warm milk, hot chocolate, steaming 
alphabet soup.  Whatever it was that people used as comfort food, as a 
barrier against the winter chill.  Only he lucked out because he got a 
fluffy comforter and a toasty cuddly Heero.  There was nothing in the 
world quite like that.  Yeah, that was the feeling creeping up on him, 
that muzzy safe secure content feeling that life couldn't get much 
better than this.

	And then fate conspired for three particularly loud simultaneous 
read/write operations, and he groaned.  "Blargh!  Can't concentrate!"

	Getting nowhere with the buttons, Heero gave up with a sigh.  
"You need to concentrate?"

	"Don't wanna be distracted," he pouted, reaching for Heero's 
hand again.  He had been in such a nice place, and those nasty computers 
had to go and ruin everything.

	With another exasperated sound, Heero levered himself into a 
semi-upright position.  "Let's go to your room."

	Duo pulled him back down again.  "No out of bed, remember?"

	As much as Heero agreed with the sentiment, it seemed rather 
illogical.  "We're obviously not getting any sleep here."

	"But it's warm!  And cozy!"

	And he agreed with that, too.  But he would still rate sleep 
above those things at the moment.  "So you're just going to tough it 
out?  What is this, some sort of pissing contest?  Maxwell versus the 
Machine?"

	Duo kissed his brow unrepentantly.  "You know I hate losing."

	Heero huffed and screwed his eyes shut again.  "Fine.  But you 
lose if you complain too much."

	The computer belched forth another spate of activity and chalked 
up another point as Duo snapped.  "Rawr!  Goddammit!  That's it.  We're 
sleeping in my room from now on!"

	"Hmpf."  Heero rolled back into his accustomed sleeping 
position.  "Whatever.  You're on your own, now."



_________________________________________
This piece of fiction is the intellectual 
property of the little turnip that could.  
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 : 3/2/2006 23:15:22 PST