fic - sleeping elephants [haven]
Title: Sleeping Elephants
Series: Moments of Haven
Summary: Sometimes, it's surprisingly okay to poke things.
Sleeping Elephants
A Moment of Haven
Duo stretched as the bus left, getting out the twitchiness that had built up on the way from the train station. The exercise inspired a yawn, in which he indulged with a modest sound. Once through, he turned to his partner and lazily gestured his readiness to proceed.
Heero set a comfortable pace down the block toward the palace of Sanq. Much work had been done to restore it since its near destruction during the fall of Sanq, but Relena's arrival on the scene had helped to steer the reconstruction in a slightly more modernized direction. Still present were the many nods to the traditionalist style, but now updated with subtle touches and enhanced by modern technologies. The renovations were coming together nicely.
The pair made it through the public areas of the palace to the restricted ones, stopping to present their identification for verification. The guard checking them against the visitor list looked them over critically. "You're early," she observed.
"I like being early," Heero answered, staring the guard down, though to the guard's credit, she simply yielded rather than quivered. Perhaps because Heero was just speaking evenly and focusing his visual attention on her, and staring her down was something of a side effect.
Duo leapt into the conversation to break up the slightly awkward silence. "Well, can't keep a princess waiting, can we?"
The guard seemed to bite back a response as she handed them their visitor's badges and waved them through.
Duo elbowed Heero lightly as they proceeded down the corridor. "You know, it's part of her job to make small talk with the visitors. It helps to ID the suspicious ones."
Heero glanced back to him curiously. "I know. Why?"
He snickered. "Well, they let you through. I guess you must officially be not-suspicious."
"Or, Relena's got us on some sort of special list."
"Heh, or that. Probably that."
They traveled down a couple more halls and through one or two foyers, where they had to stop for another security check before proceeding into the true innards of the palace. And once there, they navigated their way in the direction of Relena's personal workspace, taking a shortcut through an open courtyard, where they came upon Relena just exiting the doorway across from them, showing someone out.
Duo politely didn't interrupt them by calling out a greeting as he might otherwise have done, despite the other person looking young and relatively informal for a place like this. He might possibly have waved just a little bit, something Relena could acknowledge with a glance while she finished up her business, but Heero somehow crossed his line of sight, and the expression on Heero's face almost demanded a double take. Duo blinked, was about to ask what was wrong, when he darted a quick look over to Relena and saw a similar pole-axed expression on her other guest's face.
With another blink, he managed a discreet, questioning noise, and received an oddly breathless murmur in response: "Sylvia Noventa."
They hadn't met, but Duo recognized the name, knew the story, insofar as Heero had shared. Since the two of them were busy staring at each other, Duo established eye contact with Relena, who was speedily forming the proper response to smooth over the social awkwardness. A subtle shift in her expression gave him his cue to gently close the remaining distance between them, Heero automatically trailing along in his wake.
Relena spoke as soon as they started moving, smoothing their way. "Heero, Duo, so good to see you again. Duo, I don't believe you've met my friend, Sylvia Noventa? Sylvia, this is Duo Maxwell, one of Heero's fellow pilots."
Duo's hand twitched in a swiftly aborted offer of handshake. He exchanged it for a bow with a modest flourish instead, figuring it would be less embarrassing to unintentionally ignore. "Pleasure to meet you, milady."
It took a second, but Sylvia came back to herself with a mild startle and automatically returned a slight curtsey. "Oh, the pleasure is mine, Mr... Maxwell," she finished, flushing slightly at her brief lapse, but of course, no one mentioned her inattention to the introduction. She had luckily suffered enough of them to have managed to process it, albeit a few seconds late.
Duo gave her a friendly smile, then threw the ball back into Relena's court, except the pass was unexpectedly intercepted.
"Sylvia Noventa," Heero said once more, this time in a more normal tone of voice. "I'm... glad to see you're doing well."
"Heero Yuy," she answered in kind. "I'm... very glad to see you... alive and well."
Duo snorted mentally. Yup, Heero deserved that.
Relena performed another lightning assessment of the situation and touched Duo's elbow. "Duo, why don't we go on inside and give these two a chance to catch up?"
Trusting in her judgment, Duo gallantly offered her his arm, which she took gracefully, and they entered the building through the same door Relena had recently emerged from. Once safely inside, however, Duo casually asked for reassurances. "Is this a good idea?"
"Well, she didn't kill him last time," Relena responded with an oddly dry wit. "I don't think she'll do it this time."
It was enough to squeeze a short laugh from Duo. He glanced out the window innocuously, putting his skills to work to mask his studious observation of the pair. They had at least begun speaking to each other, though the conversation still seemed rather uncomfortable. "Okay. Fair enough. Is this necessary, then?"
"Necessary...?" Relena repeated as she pondered. "Well, they've already run into each other here. My apologies, by the way. I think our visit ran a little late, and you arrived a little early. I certainly would never intentionally schedule people on top of each other like that. But as I said... What's done is done. They've already run into each other. I think things would only be so much more unresolved if they walked away from an opportunity for a meaningful conversation."
"Heero's never really seemed all that unresolved about it to me... but then again, we've never really talked much about it." He thought he could probably ask and Heero would talk more or less freely about it, but Duo tried to avoid picking at the past for no good reason. Now that the subject had come up, though, he had every reason to ask for some more clarification on Heero's stance in the near future.
"Well, I won't put words into Heero's mouth, then. Sylvia, at least... Well, I won't betray her confidences, either. But as she said... I'm sure she'll be happy to talk to him, and see for herself that he's still alive and well."
Duo chuckled softly. "After a stunt like that... You know, I like to think I know him pretty well, but there will always be things I just don't get about him. That whole... Noventa thing he did? Probably gonna be one of them."
"I'll probably never understand it entirely, either, but... I can't say I understand a lot of things about him." She smiled a little bit ruefully. "But that was a rough period for all of you, as I understand it."
"Yeah..." He was silent for a few seconds. "I guess in that light... I guess we were all a little bit... looking for the answers. And I guess he and I rarely arrive at our answers from the same direction. But hey, where would the fun in that be?" he ended with an upbeat shrug.
"Oh, that's a good sign," she said, pleased as she carefully didn't look out the window in any obvious way. "She smiled."
Duo nodded with a nonchalant air. "She's a shy one, is she?"
"She is. She steps up beautifully when it comes to the Noventa Foundation's values, but otherwise... as a politician's young daughter, we're often encouraged to be seen and not heard." Her father had encouraged her independent thinking, but as a diplomat, he had also taught her that there was a time and a place for speaking one's mind.
Personally, Duo preferred to be neither seen nor heard, but as far as familiarity with the concept went, he could recall at least one set of parents adopting a child for show. Sure, it was a bit of a bummer, and entirely not for him, but the kid got clothed and fed as long as he toed the line. There were worse fates out there. "She visit often?"
"Not currently, but I think we might be seeing more of each other in the future. I believe her grandmother is grooming her to lead the Foundation next."
"Huh. Guess Heero will have his eye on yet another girl, then."
"Jealous?" Relena teased.
To her surprise, he answered somewhat seriously. "Not really. Sure, it gets a little weird sometimes, but... Hey, it's Heero. What with him doesn't get weird sometimes?"
"Duo..."
"Nah, I mean it," he said, answering her tone earnestly but with an airy wave of his hand. It was a reflection of his own surprise that he would actually go poking that peacefully sleeping elephant, but it was rare that he had a conversation with Relena, just the two of them. In that regard, he wasn't surprised that something strange happened. "I know you and him have got one thing, and me and him have got this other thing. Same with him and her, I guess. There's no reason all those things can't get along."
"That's very generous of you." She was equally sincere in her expression, but didn't think it would go over so well on its own, so she slipped some irony in there to fill it out.
Her subtlety of tone was perhaps ignored by him. "How about you?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, me and him, we've got a thing..."
Oh. She supposed it was only fair that she reciprocate. "The same could be said for Heero and me."
"Indeed."
"No reason all those things can't get along." She felt inadequate simply repeating Duo's words, so she one-upped him haughtily. "This is Sanq, after all, and we believe in everyone getting along."
Duo laughed softly and doffed an imaginary hat in her direction. "Well played, Princess. Well played."
They absorbed that silently for a minute before Relena made a declaration. "I'd like for us to have a thing, Duo."
"...Huh?"
"Yes," she nodded firmly. "A thing. You and I. We shall have one. In fact, I think we already do, because with whom else can I roll my eyes when it comes to Heero's overprotective tendencies? Whom else can I work with to look out for Heero's best interests?"
Duo's skeptical look gradually faded into an amused smirk. "I bet if the two of us ganged up on him, we'd be able to get him to do pretty much anything."
"That would be an abuse of power," Relena intoned gravely, letting the words sink in for a second before finishing up with a sparkle in her eye. "In the wrong hands."
A small snort snuck its way past Duo's defenses. "Lucky for him, we're looking out for his best interests."
"We're sharing the Heero experience. Different sides of the Heero experience, to be sure, but the Heero experience nonetheless."
Another little chuckle slipped out. "'Heero experience', eh? Disturbingly appropriate. But... well, if we're gonna have this 'thing', our thing, we should make it a proper thing."
"How so?"
"Can we share something that isn't entirely about Heero?" His words came out with a wry twist of humor, but he oddly wasn't quite sure if it was entirely a joke or not.
Relena made a show of thinking about it. "Hmm. Oh, I know. We can share hair care tips."
Duo blinked at her for a full two seconds before laughing outright. "Okay, Princess. You got yourself a thing."
"A thing," she repeated proudly. She glanced out the window to judge that Heero and Sylvia seemed to be wrapping up their conversation, and sighed in satisfaction that all seemed to have gone well. "You know... I'm not sure when you and the others stopped being simply 'Heero's friends' to me, or 'Heero's fellow pilots'. But I'm glad you're all individuals of your own merit to me now. Very glad."
Also looking out the window, ostensibly at a large tree and definitely not at the two people out in the courtyard, Duo sifted through his thoughts to find some words. "I'm not sure when you went from being Heero's crazy... female civilian counterpart to... this person I have a thing with, but... Yeah. I think that's pretty cool, too."
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Series: Moments of Haven
Summary: Sometimes, it's surprisingly okay to poke things.
Sleeping Elephants
A Moment of Haven
Duo stretched as the bus left, getting out the twitchiness that had built up on the way from the train station. The exercise inspired a yawn, in which he indulged with a modest sound. Once through, he turned to his partner and lazily gestured his readiness to proceed.
Heero set a comfortable pace down the block toward the palace of Sanq. Much work had been done to restore it since its near destruction during the fall of Sanq, but Relena's arrival on the scene had helped to steer the reconstruction in a slightly more modernized direction. Still present were the many nods to the traditionalist style, but now updated with subtle touches and enhanced by modern technologies. The renovations were coming together nicely.
The pair made it through the public areas of the palace to the restricted ones, stopping to present their identification for verification. The guard checking them against the visitor list looked them over critically. "You're early," she observed.
"I like being early," Heero answered, staring the guard down, though to the guard's credit, she simply yielded rather than quivered. Perhaps because Heero was just speaking evenly and focusing his visual attention on her, and staring her down was something of a side effect.
Duo leapt into the conversation to break up the slightly awkward silence. "Well, can't keep a princess waiting, can we?"
The guard seemed to bite back a response as she handed them their visitor's badges and waved them through.
Duo elbowed Heero lightly as they proceeded down the corridor. "You know, it's part of her job to make small talk with the visitors. It helps to ID the suspicious ones."
Heero glanced back to him curiously. "I know. Why?"
He snickered. "Well, they let you through. I guess you must officially be not-suspicious."
"Or, Relena's got us on some sort of special list."
"Heh, or that. Probably that."
They traveled down a couple more halls and through one or two foyers, where they had to stop for another security check before proceeding into the true innards of the palace. And once there, they navigated their way in the direction of Relena's personal workspace, taking a shortcut through an open courtyard, where they came upon Relena just exiting the doorway across from them, showing someone out.
Duo politely didn't interrupt them by calling out a greeting as he might otherwise have done, despite the other person looking young and relatively informal for a place like this. He might possibly have waved just a little bit, something Relena could acknowledge with a glance while she finished up her business, but Heero somehow crossed his line of sight, and the expression on Heero's face almost demanded a double take. Duo blinked, was about to ask what was wrong, when he darted a quick look over to Relena and saw a similar pole-axed expression on her other guest's face.
With another blink, he managed a discreet, questioning noise, and received an oddly breathless murmur in response: "Sylvia Noventa."
They hadn't met, but Duo recognized the name, knew the story, insofar as Heero had shared. Since the two of them were busy staring at each other, Duo established eye contact with Relena, who was speedily forming the proper response to smooth over the social awkwardness. A subtle shift in her expression gave him his cue to gently close the remaining distance between them, Heero automatically trailing along in his wake.
Relena spoke as soon as they started moving, smoothing their way. "Heero, Duo, so good to see you again. Duo, I don't believe you've met my friend, Sylvia Noventa? Sylvia, this is Duo Maxwell, one of Heero's fellow pilots."
Duo's hand twitched in a swiftly aborted offer of handshake. He exchanged it for a bow with a modest flourish instead, figuring it would be less embarrassing to unintentionally ignore. "Pleasure to meet you, milady."
It took a second, but Sylvia came back to herself with a mild startle and automatically returned a slight curtsey. "Oh, the pleasure is mine, Mr... Maxwell," she finished, flushing slightly at her brief lapse, but of course, no one mentioned her inattention to the introduction. She had luckily suffered enough of them to have managed to process it, albeit a few seconds late.
Duo gave her a friendly smile, then threw the ball back into Relena's court, except the pass was unexpectedly intercepted.
"Sylvia Noventa," Heero said once more, this time in a more normal tone of voice. "I'm... glad to see you're doing well."
"Heero Yuy," she answered in kind. "I'm... very glad to see you... alive and well."
Duo snorted mentally. Yup, Heero deserved that.
Relena performed another lightning assessment of the situation and touched Duo's elbow. "Duo, why don't we go on inside and give these two a chance to catch up?"
Trusting in her judgment, Duo gallantly offered her his arm, which she took gracefully, and they entered the building through the same door Relena had recently emerged from. Once safely inside, however, Duo casually asked for reassurances. "Is this a good idea?"
"Well, she didn't kill him last time," Relena responded with an oddly dry wit. "I don't think she'll do it this time."
It was enough to squeeze a short laugh from Duo. He glanced out the window innocuously, putting his skills to work to mask his studious observation of the pair. They had at least begun speaking to each other, though the conversation still seemed rather uncomfortable. "Okay. Fair enough. Is this necessary, then?"
"Necessary...?" Relena repeated as she pondered. "Well, they've already run into each other here. My apologies, by the way. I think our visit ran a little late, and you arrived a little early. I certainly would never intentionally schedule people on top of each other like that. But as I said... What's done is done. They've already run into each other. I think things would only be so much more unresolved if they walked away from an opportunity for a meaningful conversation."
"Heero's never really seemed all that unresolved about it to me... but then again, we've never really talked much about it." He thought he could probably ask and Heero would talk more or less freely about it, but Duo tried to avoid picking at the past for no good reason. Now that the subject had come up, though, he had every reason to ask for some more clarification on Heero's stance in the near future.
"Well, I won't put words into Heero's mouth, then. Sylvia, at least... Well, I won't betray her confidences, either. But as she said... I'm sure she'll be happy to talk to him, and see for herself that he's still alive and well."
Duo chuckled softly. "After a stunt like that... You know, I like to think I know him pretty well, but there will always be things I just don't get about him. That whole... Noventa thing he did? Probably gonna be one of them."
"I'll probably never understand it entirely, either, but... I can't say I understand a lot of things about him." She smiled a little bit ruefully. "But that was a rough period for all of you, as I understand it."
"Yeah..." He was silent for a few seconds. "I guess in that light... I guess we were all a little bit... looking for the answers. And I guess he and I rarely arrive at our answers from the same direction. But hey, where would the fun in that be?" he ended with an upbeat shrug.
"Oh, that's a good sign," she said, pleased as she carefully didn't look out the window in any obvious way. "She smiled."
Duo nodded with a nonchalant air. "She's a shy one, is she?"
"She is. She steps up beautifully when it comes to the Noventa Foundation's values, but otherwise... as a politician's young daughter, we're often encouraged to be seen and not heard." Her father had encouraged her independent thinking, but as a diplomat, he had also taught her that there was a time and a place for speaking one's mind.
Personally, Duo preferred to be neither seen nor heard, but as far as familiarity with the concept went, he could recall at least one set of parents adopting a child for show. Sure, it was a bit of a bummer, and entirely not for him, but the kid got clothed and fed as long as he toed the line. There were worse fates out there. "She visit often?"
"Not currently, but I think we might be seeing more of each other in the future. I believe her grandmother is grooming her to lead the Foundation next."
"Huh. Guess Heero will have his eye on yet another girl, then."
"Jealous?" Relena teased.
To her surprise, he answered somewhat seriously. "Not really. Sure, it gets a little weird sometimes, but... Hey, it's Heero. What with him doesn't get weird sometimes?"
"Duo..."
"Nah, I mean it," he said, answering her tone earnestly but with an airy wave of his hand. It was a reflection of his own surprise that he would actually go poking that peacefully sleeping elephant, but it was rare that he had a conversation with Relena, just the two of them. In that regard, he wasn't surprised that something strange happened. "I know you and him have got one thing, and me and him have got this other thing. Same with him and her, I guess. There's no reason all those things can't get along."
"That's very generous of you." She was equally sincere in her expression, but didn't think it would go over so well on its own, so she slipped some irony in there to fill it out.
Her subtlety of tone was perhaps ignored by him. "How about you?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, me and him, we've got a thing..."
Oh. She supposed it was only fair that she reciprocate. "The same could be said for Heero and me."
"Indeed."
"No reason all those things can't get along." She felt inadequate simply repeating Duo's words, so she one-upped him haughtily. "This is Sanq, after all, and we believe in everyone getting along."
Duo laughed softly and doffed an imaginary hat in her direction. "Well played, Princess. Well played."
They absorbed that silently for a minute before Relena made a declaration. "I'd like for us to have a thing, Duo."
"...Huh?"
"Yes," she nodded firmly. "A thing. You and I. We shall have one. In fact, I think we already do, because with whom else can I roll my eyes when it comes to Heero's overprotective tendencies? Whom else can I work with to look out for Heero's best interests?"
Duo's skeptical look gradually faded into an amused smirk. "I bet if the two of us ganged up on him, we'd be able to get him to do pretty much anything."
"That would be an abuse of power," Relena intoned gravely, letting the words sink in for a second before finishing up with a sparkle in her eye. "In the wrong hands."
A small snort snuck its way past Duo's defenses. "Lucky for him, we're looking out for his best interests."
"We're sharing the Heero experience. Different sides of the Heero experience, to be sure, but the Heero experience nonetheless."
Another little chuckle slipped out. "'Heero experience', eh? Disturbingly appropriate. But... well, if we're gonna have this 'thing', our thing, we should make it a proper thing."
"How so?"
"Can we share something that isn't entirely about Heero?" His words came out with a wry twist of humor, but he oddly wasn't quite sure if it was entirely a joke or not.
Relena made a show of thinking about it. "Hmm. Oh, I know. We can share hair care tips."
Duo blinked at her for a full two seconds before laughing outright. "Okay, Princess. You got yourself a thing."
"A thing," she repeated proudly. She glanced out the window to judge that Heero and Sylvia seemed to be wrapping up their conversation, and sighed in satisfaction that all seemed to have gone well. "You know... I'm not sure when you and the others stopped being simply 'Heero's friends' to me, or 'Heero's fellow pilots'. But I'm glad you're all individuals of your own merit to me now. Very glad."
Also looking out the window, ostensibly at a large tree and definitely not at the two people out in the courtyard, Duo sifted through his thoughts to find some words. "I'm not sure when you went from being Heero's crazy... female civilian counterpart to... this person I have a thing with, but... Yeah. I think that's pretty cool, too."
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