Warnings/Notes/Disclaimer: mild shounen ai, 1+2. Heero and/or Duo may be OOC. I’m not sure. Possibly not…I’ve never really been inside their heads, so I wouldn’t know. My first GW fic. I’d like to know what you think of it. Also [as you know] Gundam Wing, Duo and Heero belong to someone who is not me. The satsumas are mine.
He’s eating an orange. It’s not an actual orange: it’s one of those smaller ones. Clementine. Tangerine. Satsuma. Something like that. He has his headphones on, the music loud enough that I can hear when the track changes. He’s lying on his stomach on his bed, his legs bent at the knees, bare feet twitching in time to the beat. Eating his oranges. He has two mesh bags of the damn things lying in front of him. I don’t know where he got them from.
I don’t care where he got them from.
He selects them carefully. I watched earlier when he picked through them, discarding several for their flaws. Now his selections are different although I’m not sure exactly what the criteria are. Having chosen his prey, he peels it quickly, dropping the peel absently into the wastebasket to his right. He never looks, but he never misses. Propped up on his elbows, he strips the segments of every single scrap of pith, flicking it after the peel. He doesn’t know that his braid is dangling in the wastebasket and that the end has flecks of white pith clinging to it.
He never does it quite the same way. Sometimes he clears the whole fruit before eating, sometimes he can’t seem to wait, stuffing a cleaned segment between his lips as he strips away pith with his slim fingers. He’s always examining: if a single piece meets with his disapproval, he discards it. Sometimes, only half a segment needs to go: he carefully severs the bad from the good with sharp white teeth.
The concentration he has invested in his task is almost comical. It’s captivating. He finishes one and the track changes as he takes another. I hope he isn’t going to eat them all. I hope he is. I hope he doesn’t look up and notice me. Hn. It doesn’t really matter if he does. After having listened to him eat six oranges in the past ten minutes I think my attention is justified.
As soon as I think it, he looks up. He smiles crookedly, hooking his headphones off with his little finger.
“Hey, Heero. You want one?”
“…” I consider leaving the room.
“Catch,” he calls as I turn to leave. I don’t mean to; I catch the fruit by reflex alone. He’s thrown half of his peeled orange at me. It leaks sticky juice down my wrist and I stare at it for a second. Leave or stay. Eat it or throw it back. Throwing it back would be impractical: it’s partially crushed and would spray juice across the room. A droplet forms on the underside of my arm and I catch it before it falls, bringing the liquid to my lips before I think. It’s sweet and slightly cool. I run a finger through the juice on my arm and taste it again.
“They’re good, try it,” Duo says around a segment, the headphones around his neck singing faintly in the quiet.
I walk further into the room and sit on the edge of my bed. Mimicking him, I begin to remove the pith. I clean it segment at a time, gathering a small pile of pith on my thigh. I eat the segments as I clean them, finding them soft and very sweet as they burst in my mouth. In no time, I have eaten all he threw at me. He notices and passes me another.
“What is it?” I ask, as if I’ve not already eaten one.
“Satsuma.”
“Hn.”
I peel it, finding the skin loose and easy to remove. Before I drop the peel into the wastebasket, I move Duo’s braid and lift it to lie on the bed by his elbow. He starts at the soft tug and looks up at me before looking at it.
“Damn,” he mutters, picking the pith from it. “Thanks.”
No problem. My pleasure. “…”
We eat in silence. I try not to watch him.
Can I tell him that I wish I was a satsuma? That I wish to have him take me, clean me, cleanse me until I meet his approval? That I wish to know what his lips feel like, what his fingers feel like…That I want to know what it feels like to have his attention so- so very very completely that he’s silent and calm, his face smooth…
Can I tell him I wish I was a satsuma!?
We eat in silence. I try not to watch him.
Owari [for now]