[Regular] Flamingos in the Yard (Maddy x Jesse) [FIN]

[natsu]

There was Destiny City proper, where you went to pick up Mickey D's or catch a movie. There were the suburbs, where the majority of the population lived (and died, depending on which news station you were tuned in to).

And then there was the place Madison Heller called home.

The lawn was a lovely shade of dried, crispy yellow, some of the grass looking like it had mold growing on it due to the heaps of dirtied snow that had sat upon it for months. A few pink flamingos that had seen better days dotted the lawn, looking a bit shell shocked from the war the foster kids would wage with them.

The lovely grass was surrounded by this two foot high "fence" created from cinder blocks that Madison's brothers had stolen from the construction sites that they had worked at. Parts of it were covered with choice terms and words in technicolour, sprayed on by locals and some of the people living in Madison's house-- around back, a block said ******** in bright green that Madison had sprayed herself in a moment of cathartic rage. She had been eight years old and had just lost the "Tiny Tater Tot's Hawaiian Miss" to little Becky Price for the third year in a row.

The house had been a duplex that had been turned in to a sort of mad shanty town, with a trailer around back that they swore they used for trips when child services came around but "getting sent to the trailer" was not a place you wanted to go. A belt hung on the inside of the door. It was a reminder.

Walking up the stairs to Madison's room, one notices an odd assortment of pictures featuring three large, dough faced young men-- and a little girl made out like a tiny doll, tottering around in heels and smiling with perfect pearly whites. If one did not know the situation, it appeared very odd-- while the pictures of the boys continued, pictures of the teal haired little doll child stopped at age 10. Seeing the wall, child services would gently pat Angelica Heller on the arm, understanding the situation.

Problem was, Madison Heller was alive and well, and currently listening to an awful mix tape she had found in the attic on her ratty cassette player. The cassette had said "Gettin Laide Mix", scrawled on in black magic marker-- Maddy had to hand it to her father, if he had managed to get laid listening to "Rasputin" he was some kind of sex lord. A jedi knight of ******** were running downstairs screaming, screaming louder as the front door opened. ("Rape!!" was the foster kid's new watch word, which would not go over well with child services at all. Which is why Maddy taught them it. Poor buggers, anywhere was better than here.) The boy who entered the house seemed to know his way around, and curiouser, a face like his featured in one of the many portraits of dour kids found around the house.

"Have you ever banged a chick to "Rock Me Amadeus?" Maddy asked as he darkened her doorway.  

[candy lamb]

Jesse Alvarez gave Maddy a look that plainly bespoke what? with a side order of the ********>, his Hillworth tie dangling around his neck like a limp green snake.

"What?"

Evidently.

The Heller household, as seen through the jaded eyes of two of its inhabitants -- well, one former -- was a lot worse than it was. Angelica Heller herself was regarded as "slightly dubious, but solid," when it came to fostering kids. Both had to grudgingly admit that she'd been doing it for years, kept on doing it, and really got nothing out of it than a carpet that was now an indeterminate shade of spilled liquids. Angelica had her downsides. All of them had involved Jon-Benet Ramsey.

But she hadn't been a terrible foster mother --

"Be a pal and never mention 'Rock Me Amadeus', with sex, again," said Jesse. The children continued their game: it seemed to be some variation on tag, possibly with a little Calvinball thrown in. The door was barricaded when they got to Maddie's room with its grass-green carpet and tacky plastic flamingos scattered everywhere, and Jesse heaved himself into a groaning plastic lawn recliner made of ancient warped tarp. His fingers drummed on the side, burnt-brown. "Get me a Coke."

"Get yourself a Coke," said Maddy.

"Hey, milady," pointed out her foster brother, "you go to Meadowview High, you now got high-and-mighty ideas about passing me a soda?" (She threw him a generic-brand Cola from a beat-up chiller bin, but she aimed at his forehead. He only just caught it.) "Good."

"d**k."

An aggressive finger was pointed her way, the other hand busy flicking off the ring-top as he swung his legs over the deck chair. The finger stabbed violently, but Jesse always gesticulated like he might hit you any moment. "You get any more snobby, you'll be spraying me with Febreze each time I come through your door."  

[natsu]

"Don't need to Febreeze you-- you smell squeaky clean," Maddy was filing her nails obnoxiously on her bed, "how many pieces of soap you dropped this week, huh?"

It was true that Angelica wasn't awful, she really wasn't; the atrocious state of Maddy's clothing was her own damn fault, the holes in the heels of her socks Maddy's own blistery badge of honour.

Maddy set her file down-- old habits died hard-- and she scuttled over the the edge of the bed, pushing her wolf fleece blanket out of her way. A plain brown paper bag was retrieved from under the bed, and she dumped the contents between her crossed legs.

"Nerds, ring pops, sweet tarts-- pick your poison," Ripping open a lurid pink ring pop, Maddy stuck it on her finger, and flung her hand towards Jesse, "Don't look at me like that, kids keep stealing my stash; they leave it alone if they think it's pot, and NO, I don't have any. Clean as a whistle, woo woo."

Madison looked a little dodgy-- dodgier than usual, really-- and just looked at Jesse. She was trying to stare in to his soul.

"You know when we were kids, we wanted to be superheroes?"  

[candy lamb]

"No," came the unhelpful reply. Jesse was slugging back his Budget Cola, one leg swung over the other. He held out one hand for his tithe: she put in a sprinkling of Nerds and a sweet tart. He moved his mouth and gave a long, cautionary lick at her ring pop, and she yanked it back in disgust. "I remember when you wanted to be a fireman. And a lion." Another swig. "Remember when you wanted a lion suit? You were, what, ten or something."

"I never got one." The ring pop was waggled his way, as though in disgust for her fate.

"A lion suit."

"You wanted to be a musketeer."

"Hey." He turned his head around again and jabbed that finger at her, eyes ringpop green. "You shut your nasty little mouth. Nothing wrong with wanting to be a musketeer. That's a gentleman's job. Chiv-al-ric." Jesse swished the word around in his mouth as though it were delicious, then followed it down with a mouthful of Nerds. In fact, 'chivalric' was all Dylan and had gotten him through the previous English midterm. "Superheroes. Okay. So what?"  

[natsu]

Maddy jammed her ring pop in her mouth with a scowl, used enough to having Jesse cooties that the sanctity of her ring pop was not harmed. She still didn't LIKE it. He probably had mouth herpes.

Jesse had always enjoyed giving her cooties. And chicken pox. And measles. And, famously, purple nerples, but only once, and Maddy had wondered at the time if Jesse might go deaf at the screaming Angelica was doing.

Clearly, he hadn't.

"There are like... 8000 things wrong with wanting to be a Musketeer, most of which involve the French. Tights. And it being totally gay, and you only wanted to be one because you had watched that movie. You know. Whatever the crap it's called," Maddy turned off the mix tape, cutting off the gentle crooning of Lionel Ritchie, "I can't believe you forgot, we played super heroes for WEEKS. You kept making me be Aquaman, you a**. Good thing I had still been brainwashed to like dolphins like any adorable little prostitot when i get to be Miss America, I want to save all the dolphins in the world because they are the geniuses of the Ocean. That is so messed. Dolphins are DELICIOUS."

Maddy fell silent.

"She keeps watching Toddlers and Tiaras, and looking at photo albums and sighing at me. All the time. Can you be my metrosexual BFF and turn me in to a dude like in She's the Man? Hillworth would be so swank."  

[candy lamb]

"No," said Jesse immediately, not even looking at her. He had picked up a baseball magazine from off the floor and had propped it up, not even reading so much as flicking the pages. "Why the hell would I do that. Tell your mom you got lice. Shave your hair." The pages got flicked faster. "No fond memories when your head doubles as a moon."

"All of your ideas are so stupid."

"All my ideas are genius and I am a genius," he said automatically, firing it off as though he were dead serious and the words were bullets. "Hell is 'swank' anyway. Change the tape."

She changed the tape. Unfortunately, this particular mix apparently contained the best of the Spice Girls, and they were soon treated to the sound of the Girls demanding that if you wanted to be their lover you had to get with their friends. The magazine was tossed onto Maddy's bed as her erstwhile foster brother slumped back on the deck chair, drumming his fingers on the arm.

"Hey, we did have some superhero games, didn't we?" His smile was always sudden and unexpected, curving his spine to look at her upside-down. Somehow he could still swig his soda this way. "I remember. I was Batman. We were hellaciously stupid kids. Remember how we used to go around having wars? Throwing rocks?" Generally with the other neighbourhood children, sometimes against each other. "Remember, you once got your eyebrow gashed open and your mom nearly throttled you 'cause you can't -- "

" -- put pancake make-up over stitches -- "

Jesse laughed again, downing the rest of the Nerds in his palm as he returned to a less disc-slipping position of rest. Maddy commented tranquilly, "You wore your underwear outside your pants, man. There's a photo around. Somewhere."

He looked over his shoulder at her. "If you ever tell anyone I did that, Madison," he said, "I will kill you, I will kill all your pets, I will kill the man who sells you smokes at the 7-11."

"I have the photo hidden in a ********> you." It didn't sound too intense. He was back at the magazine again.  

[natsu]

"No, ******** you. Consider it collateral for the next time you get in a fender bender with the rape-mobile."

"You should have seen the other guy."

"I DID see the other guy, he showed up the next day screaming at the door, I got grounded FOREVER. Just remember the next time you get the urge to take the van, I will plaster this photo in the school trifecta."

Madison smiled smuggly.

"Oh, the pictures I have found. There's one of you in a dress, I'm saving it for a special occasion. You look beautiful," Maddy, crunching on the sugary shards of the ringpop, threw a hastily stapled booklet towards Jesse.

"Mom loves their outfits, by the way. Some goth chick handed that to me last week, looked a bit terrified in her slipknot sweatshirt. Apparently terrorists are more interesting than Naruto now, some kids are wearing brooches on their sailor tops mimicking them. Better than those godawful headbands, but it's so lame."

The booklet was a black and white photocopied underground exposé on the terrorists-- unfortunately (or fortunately, if you were a hot blooded male) all the pictures were upskirts and didn't seem to be magical in any nature.

"I think I'm gonna pull a Peter Parker and do my own pics, these are just ugg. Mom would probably take me to a studio to get airbrushed, bless her heart."  

[candy lamb]

"Come on, stop talking about her," said Jesse, and rolled himself up off the bed to sit beside her in one of his manic fits of sympathy -- in his Hillworth shirt he looked like somebody who worked at McDonald's, she had said so a multitude of times, but now his eyes were intensely focused on her. "Jesus, you're so hung up on your mother. Listen to me." She was already blowing a raspberry. "Zip your mouth. You graduate next year."

"I'm going to Disneyland," said Maddy.

"Wrong." Jesse stood up again and weighed himself back in the hammock she had stretched across wall to wall, displacing a few of her stuffed toys and flicking a motheaten pig on its sad way down to the floor. "You're gonna turn your life around."

She was already rescuing the pig and doing terrible things to it -- splaying its little pig legs, prodding her finger inbetween its hems to get at its stuffing, generally torturing it until he said, "Gimme that," and she avoided him trying to snatch it back to safety. Instead, Jesse continued: "You have to get out of here. Get your sorry a** and get out, Maddy."

"To Disneyland?"

"No." He finally rescued the pig and tossed it over his shoulder, restless. "I'm trying to care about you for once, actually. You moving out?"  

[natsu]

"Haha ha. Har har. On who's buck am I moving out on. If we are going to have a DEEPLY SERIOUS conversation, I can't move out on my retarded paycheck from Bob's, I make crap grades and don't volunteer, so buh-bye SH, because I get crap grades I'm ineligible for an athletic scholarshit, and my SINGLE, BRILLIANT PLAN to join the army was like. Genuinely kiboshed like, two months ago."

The pig's head had come off a few times, and Maddy had painstakingly stitched it back on every time, humming "Operation!" to herself. Pig had been her best friend until she was three.

"I have magic powers dude. No shitting you, I do. I don't think the Sailor army takes kindly to deserters so I'm stuck here until I have no idea when."

Madison looked at him with mournful eyes.

"I hate when you try to be manly and responsible, it's annoying. Can't we just rob a bank and I can get sent to girly prison and get prison tats?"  

[candy lamb]

The last sentence had gone unheard. Jesse had lain stock-still, tangled in the hammock, ever since sailor army; he'd been looking out the window as though he were more interested in the slightly grimy curtains and the old decals stuck up on the glass, but he pitched himself up and stood in front of Maddy with his arms folded. His face was a thundercloud, but she had seen all of the storms of Jesse's mood and could tell how bad the lightning was going to get: he yanked her up and they stood there in front of each other, mirroring. Arms crossed.

"I heard you," said Jesse.

"That's cool because I am not learning sign if you go deaf," said Maddy. She raised one hand, with a middle finger. "This is the only one I know. Guess what it meaaans."

"I'm talking to you," said Jesse, with that same quietness.

"If you went mute-deaf it'd be -- "

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking." Frustration. That was a usual peal. He sounded as frustrated as he was angry. Now he was walking away and throwing his hands up, making the hammock rock again, flinging himself against the wall with a thud like bodychecking it would do something. "How long. God, way to -- way to underwhelm me, Heller."

"That's a five-buck word. Did you learn the new vocab from your roomie?"

"How. Long. Two words, this s**t ain't hard."  

[natsu]

"Want a ******** light show then, Alvarez? I was born this way I guess, I just came out of the closet."

Jesse stared her down.

"Fine, two months. Two months ago, and then a week ago-- that's complicated. I still don't know what the ******** is up with that part."

His reaction was usual, completely and fully Jesse to fling himself bodily in to walls when having a temper tantrum. And he really did seem to be having a temper tantrum.

Madison was about to blow more s**t out of the water than she could even comprehend.

"Gaia Parallel Power, Make Up!"

After the strobe lights finished, Madison Heller was gone; in her place was Sailor Gaia, in all of her short skirted glory. Transferring her clay pot from hand to hand, Sailor Gaia didn't meet Jesse's eyes.

"I just wanted you to be the Alfred to my Batman-- please don't be evil, I'll have to kill you if you were evil and that would be AWFUL."  

[candy lamb]

Sailor Gaia continued to not meet Jesse's eyes. Children screamed somewhere. A hammer hit somewhere. He didn't say a thing. There was a possibility that maybe he was going to say yeah, I am evil, sorry about that, and then they really would kill each other as her mother had always said they'd end up.

"Are you going to tell your Queen you outed yourself like this," said her fosterbrother, though she was still looking at her feet for guidance, "or should I do it for you?"

Wait, what.

She noticed that all of the dust swirls on the ground were being blown around her ankles. When she jerked her chin up, there was a rapier aimed her way as though it was ready to poke a dimple in her cheek. Jesse Alvarez was gone: Sailor Gaia and Captain Hector stared at each other like two children looking at each other for the first time, a sort of dawning recognition that they were the same species. And then it was more than that: he kept his rapier still, deadly still, even as she gawped and he just stared with his mouth folded but his Alexandros-purple eyes trained on her own --

Dead silence.

"Serve our Earth better than that," said Hector, but then he'd sheathed his sword and his hands were in hers and he was squeezing them warmly out of greeting. And he wasn't quite Jesse, not at all. They were like blurred mirror images that sat comfortably on top of one another, two alike hues that made one colour. It wasn't at all like the nagging shrillness of Gaia when aligned to Madison Heller. Jesse Alvarez was Hector. Of course. It would never have been anything different. And he was saying: "Jesus -- not gonna say you didn't have me scared for a moment -- "  

[natsu]

"You're Jesse. Gaia says you're Hector which is I guess, the same thing-- she wants me to bow but I," Sailor Gaia bowed choppily, "er. We're still working out the kinks here, obviously. What I mean is, you're about the only one I have to tell anything to-- if I died, I needed to have someone to come pick up my bloody parts and cart them off in a popcorn box, you know?"

Sailor Gaia sat down heavily on her bed, and cupped her chin in her hands. It was a bit baffling, both being in the same group, but at least he wasn't evil. Thank god for small miracles.

"I'll tell Selene later-- she's going to be disappointed in me. Crap. Didn't really think this through, did I?"

Madison's eyes deepened to a violet hue, and she sat up properly (Madison would say like she had a rod stuck up her a**, but that was a bit unfair; Gaia wasn't doing it for any other reason than that was how she was taught-- and Madison slouched because she COULD) and broke out in to a winning smile.

"We both had a good feeling about you, I have to admit. I honestly thought it was more prudent for us to tell someone, rather than niggling at it like a loose tooth. But it is good to see you Hector; funny how things worked out, isn't it?"  

[candy lamb]

"Funny like this, soldier," said the cavalier captain. "If I told Selene, she'd rip your arms off and beat you with them."

"Hardly."

"Want to bet? -- I'm not going to tell."

"Thank you," said Gaia, unruffled.

"You owe me," was all Hector said, and threw his hands up again as though he were exasperated. Then he strode over to her wall, undoing the curtains so that he could yank them across the sticker-covered window. "I'm not -- what's the word -- superstitious. This happened for a reason."

He didn't sound as though he believed that, but he sounded frustrated with himself -- he was muttering at a fold of the curtain, squinting down at it between beetling brows as though it was the personal source of every war and bloodshed in the world. In fact, it still had unicorn iron-ons around the hem. Finally, more at peace, he said, "Hey. You probably know this by now. Rasmussen -- he's the Prince."  

[natsu]

"Apparently so, if Dylan is Alexandros-- Madison is bringing up the same sort of rumors that have always pervaded your every move, Hector," Gaia sighed, and crossed one leg delicately over the other. Madison was content to let Gaia speak as she was, at the very least, a bit more eloquent, "it would of course be in Alexandros' best interests to choose someone as like his brother as he could, if only for familiarity. Considering the fact that I shared my home between the Earth and the Moon, I could not dare to suppose that I share the same sort of familiarity with Nehelenia, let alone Corinna."

It was still winter, though the tail end, and the days were still short. Drawing the blinds plunged them in to filtered shadows, though both were a little brighter than they had been before. Not so much as though they were glowing, but more that there was just MORE of them then there had been before.

"Don't look at me like that," Hector had been staring at her through her speech, "Madison is fully capable of speaking like a human being-- possibly better than most, Angelica taught her deportment for years-- we are still the same. I push your buttons, and I didn't think it was a very good idea to just say whatever diarrhea splurged out of my mouth. She's cool, she thinks before I speak. Which sounds so messed, I know--"

The two were interrupted by a sudden banging on Madison's door, the sound of several Elementary school children shoulder checking unmistakable, especially if familiar with the Heller abode.

"MAAAADDDZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Mom says we need to be feedddddddddddd."

The kids started to scritch at the door. One of them had seized a coat hanger, and was shoving it under the door, trying to gouge whoever was dumb enough to be standing near the door frame.