Maybe she should not have been surprised when it was Heero-kun who wandered out of the spare bedroom first not much later in the morning. She and Trunks-kun had already eaten their shares of the breakfast foods, and Trunks-kun was in the other room now training, once he had quickly determined that neither of their guests had moved into it last night.
Personally, she wasn't too surprised by that. There was Trunks-kun's strength in numbers theory, but she honestly just got a feeling the two of them were fairly close, just from body language and all that she had picked up last night. How close she couldn't exactly tell and she didn't want to fathom a guess and be wrong about something like this.
"Good morning," she greeted him quietly. Heero-kun started like someone was shooting at him, but he quickly recovered. "There's food down here if you're hungry yet."
Wait a minute... 'Heero-kun'? Well, apparently at some point between late last night and now, she had made a decision about trusting them, and she had come down in their favor. She wasn't going to argue the decision, not right now. She wasn't going to give too much thought about whether or not that weird dream of hers had anything to do with her decision to trust the pair of them.
She remained quiet as Heero-kun crossed the common area, finally taking a seat across from her. He was silent in turn as she pushed one of the two remaining portions over towards him. So he actually surprised her by asking, "There isn't any tea by any chance?"
It took her a second or two to recover her ability to speak. "I wish there was. I never thought I would miss green tea in the morning." Catching herself rambling, she winced slightly and continued, "There's only water. Sorry."
All Heero-kun did was nod slightly and go back to his breakfast.
Maybe she had made a mistake about how close he and Duo-kun were after all. Or maybe he just didn't trust her or Trunks-kun; it wasn't as if he had said more than a few words in their presence at all since they had been awake. Or maybe she should stick to her initial assessment: that Heero-kun was the strong but silent type.
Honestly, she didn't know what to make of him. She wasn't able to get much of a reading off of him. It was like trying to read emotions off a brick wall, as clichéd as that sounded even to her own mind.
If she had to try to guess at anything she was picking up off of him, she would guess that it was loneliness. No, maybe 'isolation' was a better word, as if Heero-kun had removed or even excised himself from large portions of the world. Well, that was sad. It seemed like a horrible way to go through life.
Still, she supposed that was what she got for only reading Duo-kun's body language last night. To be fair, Duo-kun had been the only one of the two with readable body language, so maybe she could be forgiven for reading things a bit wrong.
She did stand by parts of her original assessment, however. They were close. She was going to change her idea from lovers to friends, though, at least as far as Duo-kun was concerned. From how close Duo-kun stood to Heero-kun and how he always seemed to be touching him when they were both awake and in the same room, however, she was willing to bet that Duo-kun was interested in more and either hadn't said anything to Heero-kun or had said something and was informed that he was firmly in the 'friends zone'; she was better the former was more likely than the latter.
The long silence had the potential to get awkward quickly, but she was oddly not feeling it yet. Despite what some of her fellow Senshi might have thought, she was not actually allergic to silence. She could sit in silence if it was necessary or if it was what the person she was with preferred. She had already come to understand that sometimes Trunks-kun needed some quiet time, so why should Heero-kun be any different? Just sitting around and being quiet wasn't exactly she was naturally good at or really enjoyed, but she could indeed do it if the situation called for it.
The quiet was interrupted by an almost imperceptible noise from the guest room--she wasn't going to let herself start thinking of it as Duo-kun and Heero-kun's room until they actually said they were planning on staying here--that had Heero-kun's head whipping around to look sharply behind him. A few seconds later, Duo-kun emerged, one hand rubbing through the sleep-mussed remains of his braid.
"Morning," he greeted sleepily, flopping down hard--hard enough to make her wince sympathetically--next to Heero. Almost immediately, he turned to bury a yawn on Heero's shoulder.
"Good morning," she returned with a smile once he turned back to face her again. "Breakfast?"
"God, no."
She blinked in surprise. Well, that had certainly been emphatic.
To her surprise, once again Heero-kun spoke up again. "Duo isn't much of a breakfast person." He paused a second before continuing. "And if there isn't any tea, there isn't any coffee either."
Duo-kun's eyes went wide. He actually looked mortally offended. "No coffee? What kind of a hellish world is this?"
"I said something similar my first day here," Trunks-kun's voice slid easily into the conversation, as he slipped into the main room from the training area, taking a seat somewhere between her and the other two in the room. "I don't think I was quite so... vocal about it, though."
At that, she had to grin. "I don't know, Trunks-kun. I thought you were pretty vocal about it."
From the faint flush that immediately started to spread across his cheeks, apparently Trunks-kun took that a bit differently than she had meant it. Thinking back over it, she could see how easily her words could be taken in a... different way. She had to chuckle to herself.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Duo-kun raise one eyebrow with an expression that was somewhere between interest and amusement and disbelief. Heero... Heero looked like he was withdrawing from the conversation already, carefully packing away his breakfast and rewrapping Duo-kun's back in the plastic convenience store sack it had apparently originally come in.
It actually hurt to see how quickly he could consign himself back to his solitude. She fought the urge to rub at the burn in her chest from it. An overly developed sense of empathy had always been one of her biggest faults and one of the biggest drawbacks to being Sailor Moon.
Wait... what? Was she... getting some of her powers back?
26 September 2012
Well... Wow... You guys, you've definitely proven that there are people out here who are reading this little story. Since the last chapter went up, there has been well over 10 reviews. It reminds me of the old days here on FFNet, when stories still got lots of reviews, instead of going by hits alone. I think I'm dating myself...
...but then I've been writing fanfic online since 1999 now, so I guess I've been through a few archives - and I'm allowed to date myself if I want to. And thirteen years isn't too bad.
I'm still on Chapter Forty-Eight ('bounce'). But then I've also been dealing with a myriad of health issues, as well as Real Life Jobs 1 and 2: I work at an academic library and I'm an Assistant Editor for Seven Seas Manga. Real Life Jobs 1 and 2 keep me busy, plus trying to finish something else for publication and fanfics. Can't forget fanfics. You guys keep me in inspiration, so thanks.
See you in the next chapter!
Apollymi