"You feel like ordering takeout?"
"It's three in the morning Heero, even if we called it in, no one would deliver it."
Despite the ungodly hour, neither agent was the least bit bored, stir crazy, or cursing the funeral they'd traded these shift hours to attend.
Right.
Well, except for the dead guy (since it really wasn't his fault).
"Believe me Duo, I'm well aware of the fact that it's 'oh-my-god it's early in the morning.' Stakeouts suck."
"Thanks for the tip Heero; I don't think I could have figured out that one on my own."
The four meter by five-meter room had been draped in blackout cloth to conceal the lighting within. It reminded Duo of the fabric in Richards' casket the week before — not a pleasant thought, not one he cared to share with his unusually forward partner either.
The sole contents of said room included two men, a table, three chairs, a recorder and a microphone, a coffeemaker that Reno had smuggled in the day before, and a sofa that had been too large to move and reeked of old dog. Duo had laid claim to the sofa, while Heero balanced on one of the stilt-legged chairs under the pretense of monitoring the equipment set up to listen to the silence in the apartment two rooms over.
Bored out of their gourds.
Which worked to Heero's advantage since he was the one waiting for Duo to make up his mind. Yeah, he'd finally gotten around to asking his partner last Friday if he'd be willing to start a relationship with him — take it slow, start dating, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And Duo had been delaying his answer for three days now (since he knew that the suspense was killing Heero and he couldn't resist doing that). But the early hour and isolation was working to Heero's advantage, and Duo could feel his resolve to drag this out another day or two slowly become crushed under the weight of the boredom of the early-morning, absolutely pointless stakeout for Preventers. He was just waiting for Heero to start pressing him for an answer...
Okay, so the inactivity and oppressive silence was eating at him. Time to poke Heero again. "Yeah, this was a picnic assignment all right."
"Well, considering that first shift noted on the ledger that she packed a bag and left for the weekend, I don't see much point in sitting here...This really bites."
Duo looked over at his partner with interest. Poor Heero, he must really be hurting. "Sucking and biting, eh? Speaking of which, did Martin leave us any food?"
Heero looked under the table, where the dim bulb cast little light. "Not sure. Hang on, there's a bag of stuff." He reached under and retrieved his prize. "It's labeled 'do not touch — this means you.'" He looked under the table again, surprised. "It was really crammed under there."
Duo rested his head on the back of the sofa, sniffed at Heero's comment, and upped his impression to either a large dog or a pack of small ones with bladder deficiencies. "Definitely Agent Martin's then. Anything good in there?"
"I don't know, here, you look." Heero wadded up the bag and tossed the grubby bundle underhand to his partner. It clinked oddly in transit.
Duo caught it and immediately stated to paw through it, reciting a laundry list of its contents to Heero as he explored: "Aha, looks like Martin has been a bad boy — he was stashing a couple of empty beer bottles, a skin mag, a box of cookies, and one, two, three candy bars."
"What kind of cookies? Anything edible?"
Duo lifted the box in question from the bag and held it to the light to examine it further. "Well, the box is sealed, so he probably didn't get a chance to poison them. Looks like fortune cookies," he rummaged some more, "a plain chocolate bar, and another one with peanuts and caramel in it, the third one has a bite taken out of it and I don't want to risk infection — his sense of humor sucks. That's it for Martin's stuff, but if you're thirsty, there's some coffee left over from last shift — it's cold, Agent Colby made it, and you'll probably have to scrape it out of the pot with a fork and bleach your stomach lining if you manage to survive the experience of drinking the stuff."
Heero glanced apprehensively over at the machine. It had a formidable reputation after all. "Is there enough for both of us?"
"Coffee? Hell yeah, hand me your mug." Duo traded the cookie box for Heero's favorite cup — the one with a Leo series MS on it — and crouched by the coffee maker, trying to figure out how to retrieve the contents of the pot without getting bitten. "Go ahead and open that while I start scraping your drink into your cup."
Duo waited for the rebuttal.
"They're Martin's."
Right on schedule.
"Heero? We're hungry now. We'll buy him some more snacks tomorrow."
Heero shrugged, he wasn't about to argue ethics with Duo while his partner was armed with the coffee-like sludge, besides which, he was hungry too. He twisted the packaging open and peered inside, rattled the box, and looked again. The scenery hadn't changed in the interim. "They're individually wrapped."
Duo didn't even look up from scraping out a second cup of coffee from the machine. "Have you ever been in Martin's kitchen? No? Well, let me just say that it's no wonder the man buys prepackaged food."
Finished with harvesting the coffee, he trudged back over to the sofa, extending Heero's mug out to him en route. "I'll trade you this fine one-of-a-kind coffee experience for a handful of those cookies."
"Done."
Duo clutched the cookies to his chest and wandered back to the sofa before cautiously sampling his coffee. He unwrapped a cookie and tried his drink again, this time better prepared for the caffeine jolt. The immediate cookie chaser camouflaged the aftertaste fairly well. "Okay, the coffee's awful, but the cookies aren't too bad."
Heero was crunching on a cookie while peering into his mug, trying to determine the possibility of the contents etching the design off of the outside of his mug. "Mine's a little stale."
"The coffee or the cookie?"
"Which do you think?"
There was a harrumphing sound from the corner of the room nearest the door — not incidentally, very close to where Duo was sitting.
Heero swallowed his cookie and turned his fortune over in his hand — holding it closer to the light source to make the fuzzy print easier to read. He read it to himself, and had a curious thought crawl into his head. "Duo?"
"Yeah."
"What's your fortune say?"
Duo looked up at him from the sofa, he was still eating his first cookie, or he might be on his second one, Heero couldn't tell.
