Moments of Haven Part 14
Peeves

Duo paused, and cocked his head to one side, listening carefully. He thought he had heard a strange sound.... There it was again. A small ripping noise. And again. He finished stuffing the duffle bag into the hall closet, shut the door, and then followed the trail of the odd noise into the kitchen, where he was greeted by the sight of Heero, sitting at the dining table, quite methodically shredding a piece of paper.

"Heero?" he asked cautiously. There were a few whole sheets of paper on the table, although apparently there used to be even more, before Heero had gotten his hands on them. Off to the side was a neat pile of little paper squares, maybe only a centimeter across. Duo couldn't help the tiny smile that crossed his lips before continuing. Even when doing something like this, Heero was painstakingly precise, folding each section in half, creasing with authority, then folding it the other way, and creasing it again, before making a nice, straight tear along the line. "Is everything okay?"

"Just dandy," Heero replied flatly, punctuating the remark with another sharp ripping noise. He frowned when he saw that the tear wasn't quite perfect, and took the time to pinch off the tiny excess before tossing it into the finished stack.

'Yeah... right,' Duo mouthed to himself, amused. He took the other seat at the table and picked up one of the whole pieces of paper to inspect. It was a memo, or part of one, anyway. The heading said it was page four of seven. With distaste, he also noted the sender and recipient. "Ah," he said in understanding. No wonder Heero was irritated. "Mark?" He was one of the Preventers' network security adminstrators.

"Mark," Heero repeated curtly. He held out his hand for the next piece of paper. Duo handed the one in his hands to him, thinking, naturally, that he wouldn't want to destroy the stack of papers out of order.

"I know I can't stand the guy, but I had no idea you couldn't, either," Duo observed mildly. Of course, Heero had to work with him a lot more often than Duo did, so perhaps he was in a better position to loathe the man. Duo had only met him a few times, but there was just something inexplicable about him, something greasy. He reminded Duo of a used car salesman.

Heero paused in his work to look up into his partner's eyes. "Duo, I despise working with the man," he informed him in his level voice. It was the same tone of voice he would have used if he had been declaring what time it was, or that dinner was burning, or that there was an armed suspect heading in his direction.

Duo blinked. Though he was well accustomed to Heero's deadpan commentary, the sentiment still caught him off-guard. "Oh," he responded somewhat lamely. "Well, I guess I've never really seen you working with him, but I had no idea. Well, until I walked in here and found you turned into a paper shredder, that is." He reached his hand out across the table and laid it on top of the stack Heero was reaching for, preventing him from getting to it. "Maybe it would help if you talked about it instead?"

Heero blinked at him like something should have been obvious to him. "Talking about it won't make the man any less annoying, Duo," he explained patiently.

"Neither will tearing up the annoying memos, Heero," Duo responded just as blandly.

They faced off in a silent battle of wills before Heero sighed minutely, and let his hand drop. He leaned back in his chair and drew his hands in to rest casually in his lap, but made no move to speak.

Duo, also withdrawing his hands from the tabletop, matched silence for silence, and blinked expectantly at him.

The seconds did not tick by audibly, for they had one of those wall clocks where the second hand moved smoothly around the face. Neither Heero nor Duo could stand the bothersome tick-tock of the clock going about its business.

"This is silly," Duo conceded finally.

Heero nodded his head slightly in acknowledgement of the point, but otherwise maintained his silence.

Duo's lips twitched. "This is the first hint I've seen that you don't like the guy."

"You know me," Heero answered evenly.

Oh, that's right. Heero could be irritated as all hell without acting irritated as all hell. Introspectionism, and all that. They'd discussed it before. It really explained an awful lot, and absolutely nothing at all, once he sat down and thought about it. "Ah, well, I suppose I do, at that. So tell me. What drives you to this?" He gestured at the tabletop. "What is it about him that annoys you so?"

Heero seemed, to Duo's eyes, to be sorting through all the possible answers to that question, there were just so many of them to choose from. "He bites his nails," the search algorithm decided should go first.

"A lot of people bite their nails, Heero." It was an unexpected privilege for him to be allowed such straightforward access to Heero's grievances. Getting a glimpse into the inner workings of Heero's mind was like finding that one four-leaf clover in a field full of dandelions. Or something. Heero always spoke the open and frank truth, disregarding mitigating circumstances, but he rarely spoke what was actually on his mind.

"He gnaws on them. During meetings. While he's working. While he's talking to you. All the time. I'm surprised he has anything left to gnaw on."

Duo wondered, for a moment, if the idea of cutting off the man's fingers with a dull machete had ever occurred to his partner. With a poker face like his, you could never quite be certain what was going on in his head. "Alright. So he gnaws constantly on his fingernails."

"That bookshelf in our office?" Heero mentioned.

"The one by the door?"

"He leans against the edge when he comes in to talk, and sort of rubs his back against it as he stands there."

"...I think we've got a little room to move that into the corner and away from the door, don't you?" Duo suggested. In fact, whether or not Heero thought that, he'd be moving that bookshelf. The thought of someone using it to scratch his back was just disturbing. "That would take care of it."

"His naming scheme makes little to no sense," Heero chose as his next complaint. "He makes up nonsense terms as he goes along. And he has terrible spelling. Do you know how hard it is to program with names that are spelled wrong? He has been quoted as saying that sometimes, when he can't come up with a good name for a variable, he will hit the keyboard a few times and accept whatever junk comes out."

Duo blinked. "That's just stupid." No wonder Heero had finally reached a breaking point -- and to him, even just admitting he was annoyed aloud meant that he had broken. Duo figured, Heero could actually be irritated, to varying degrees, by a large number of things, but he had a very high tolerance for irritation, among other things. Meaning that, usually, he just put up with it and didn't let it bother him, up until it reached that certain overflowing point, then, bam! all of a sudden, it gets revealed, and who knew it was even there? Since he usually didn't let all the little, individual bothers bother him, they might as well not even exist, to the outside observer, so it was a rare opportunity indeed to sneak a peek at them.

"Yes," Heero agreed mildly. "It is. On our last assignment, it took us a whole day to track a bug down to his foolishness. He thought it would be amusing to see if you could undefine zero. When he redefined it, he did so incorrectly, and messed up... everything....And then he laughed it off."

"Kinda makes you wonder how he ever got his position." Heero shrugged, as if to say, I don't care, I just would rather he were out of it. "What else?"

The search went whirring off again. "He's... inefficient."

He said it so distastefully, it seemed like the ultimate damnation. Duo told himself not to smile again. "How so?"

"And disorganized," Heero appended to his condemnation. "And unreasonable. He refuses to conform to standard style procedures, even when he is working with others. Did you know he was last year's winner of the obfuscated coding competition?"

"Ummm, no," Duo replied cautiously. "But I guess I'm not surprised."

"He put his implementation and his interface in the same file," Heero carried on, "for no discernable purpose but that he wanted to. And then wasted an hour fooling with the compiler settings in order to make it accept the source from the header files. He could have just cut and paste them into separate files, and we could have moved on like normal people, but he insisted that a compiler existed to do his evil bidding, and therefore it would do as he told it to. And then he cackled."

"Ah, that would be the one I can hear from down the hall, right?"

"Yes."

Wow. The words finding their way off of Heero's lips were coming dangerously close to edged. Maybe he'd have to wash his mouth out with sandpaper. "I admire your fortitude, Heero. Now I'm almost afraid to ask..."

"He stands too close to me," Heero answered without the question.

Ooh, that one was a definite mistake on Mark's part, Duo thought with a wince. Heero guarded his personal space jealously. He had spent too many years where the only people who wanted to get that close to him were people who had wanted to hurt him. It had taken months for him to stop twitching in an aborted self-defense maneuver every time someone tapped him on the shoulder, but it still made him uneasy. Sure, he had gotten a little more comfortable with casual tactile contact, but it always depended on who was doing what to him, with what intentions. It took a lot to win yourself entry to Heero's comfort zone. Mark had certainly done nothing to merit it. "Well, you could try moving away...?"

"He leaned in and commandeered my mouse, the other day. You were out of the office, at the time. When I rolled my chair away from him, he took advantage of the space and moved in. Then he had the gall to ask me to move over more so he could work."

Duo was still rather bemused by this unexpected hostility towards their co-worker, not that the casual observer would really peg it as hostility. Heero continued to list his complaints in a low, even tone, but Duo knew better. There was that peculiar glint in Heero's eye that spoke volumes to him. "Well, I'm sure you were glad of the excuse to get away from him, then."

"It was a mistake. When I finally reclaimed my mouse, it was damp."

"...Damp?"

"He had perspired all over it."

Eww. So that's why that bottle of isopropyl had turned up in their office. "Well," Duo temporized, "a lot of people have sweaty palms...."

"He dripped, Duo."

Blink. "No, don't tell me he --"

"Left a puddle on my desk."

Blink blink. "Ewww!" Duo had to say, unable to restrain himself. He was sure it was ickier from Heero's standpoint, but still. Ewww. But 'ewww' rarely got a man fired. Mark got his job done, one way or another. It looked like Heero was going to get stuck having to deal with him, although Duo decided he'd try to help Heero get assigned to things other than network security. He knew Heero liked that sort of thing, but he'd probably rather do something else than have to suffer in silence like that. "I feel for you, man."

"Thank you," was the dignified response.

Duo silently handed the next square of paper to his partner.

Heero's lips twitched as he stared at it for a moment. "Thank you," he said again quietly, before taking it and getting back to work.

Duo joined him.

OWARI

based on true life experiences. if you sympathize and you know it, clap your hands! *clap clap* this fic dedicated to myself and my poor, suffering sister, and anyone else out there, who has to put up with individuals like this.

 

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