Minor Thing

WARNING: This story contains slash, ya know, boy likes boy, and maybe even boy does other stuff with boy. Nothing graphic though. Oh, and there's some bad language. Come on, teenage boys swear. At least the ones I know.  
  
  
  
Minor Thing  
  
by sugar.coated  
  
  
  
The pale light shone against the smooth walls, reflecting back a ghostly gleam that barely lit the long dark tunnels enough to see the floor. Two pair of feet caused sounds of heavy steps on stone, which brought forward an uncanny echo all around. The air was stale, and it smelled like most old basements did when they had been left for the rats, receiving no attention whatsoever the latest decade. The cold seemed to leak out from the walls, and the roof, which wasn't too far above the two figures moving trough the old culvert, was covered in something dark and somewhat slimy. Both of them tried not to pay too much attention to it, instead keeping their eyes on the ground.  
  
The darker of the two sighted, then frowned as he realized that his breath made white clouds in the air. He drew his jacket closer around himself and grumbled.  
  
"Why are we doing this again?" he asked, vaguely noting that his voice also echoed, getting an eerily tone, which would have been just at home in a low- budget horror flick of the kind bored teenagers watched at Halloween.  
  
His white-haired partner in crime sighted.  
  
"I've told you Lance, this culvert leads to a hospital. And from there, we can get to a asylum not too far from New York."  
  
"And we're going there because . . .?"  
  
"It's fun and educational. Now shut up!"  
  
Lance muttered a curse under his breath, then walked right into Pietro who had stopped to examine the old map that was one of the reasons the brown- haired youth wasn't relaxing at home right now.  
  
"Watch it!" Pietro glared at Lance. Lance glared back. The pale boy was the other reason. He had found the map while cleaning out the basement, and discovered that the culverts that were presented on it started under their very school. Turned out Bayville High had been a mental institution in the past. And for some reason, the overly hyperactive teen had thought it would be a good idea spending Friday night first breaking into the school, and then into the culverts beneath through a former locked door in the basement. And even if Pietro was equipped with a flashlight and the map, Lance figured he would get lost somehow and spend the rest of his life zooming around in the tunnels. Therefore, Lance had joined Pietro's insane quest.  
  
~It's not that I like him,~ Lance argued with himself. ~I mean, he's nice and all, just incredibly annoying. It wouldn't be a big loss, but Magneto would probably be royally pissed if he comes back from space and finds out his son is lost somewhere under Bayville.~ After thinking this, Lance caught himself staring at Pietro's ass. Luckily, the pale boy was too busy studying the map to notice. The brown-haired teen quickly looked away. ~Bad Lance! You do not find Pietro attractive! You do not think he has a nice ass!~ Of course, Lance's body wasn't cooperating with his brain. His eyes kept roaming over the younger boy's body, and Lance suddenly had the insane urge to bang his head against the wall, just to stop himself from thinking about his friend in _that_ way.  
  
The object of his affection was obvious to his inner turmoil. In fact, he'd been standing perfectly still, just staring at the map, for the last couple of minutes. This was something new when it came to Pietro. He usually couldn't concentrate on _anything_ for more than 30 seconds at the time, least of all a boring old map.  
  
"Pietro?" Lance asked, beginning to suspect something wasn't right.  
  
"Uhmm . . ." Pietro shone the flashlight down the tunnel to the right, then to the left. He turned around to look down the direction they'd come from, then studied the map intently again. "Fuck."  
  
"'Fuck'?" Lance repeated, giving Pietro a murderous look. This wasn't looking good. "Why 'fuck'?"  
  
"Well . . ." The younger boy glanced around somewhat nervously. "We might be . . . kinda . . . lost . . .?"  
  
"Lost?" Lance was beginning to feel decidedly Pietro-cidal at the moment. He was _so_ not in the mood for this.  
  
"Yeah, I think they've sorta rebuilt down here since this map was drawn, so some tunnels are missing . . . or added . . . or somewhere else than they should be . . ."  
  
"So we're lost. Can we get out of here, or are we so lost we'll be spending the rest of our lives trying to find the way out?"  
  
"I think I remember the way back . . . Maybe we should return now?"  
  
As an answer, Lance gave Pietro a look that he usually reserved for Summers or any teacher trying to give the earthmover detention. The message was clear. Lance was _not_ happy.  
  
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~Murder is a crime. Murder is a crime.~ These were the thoughts that went through Lance's head at the moment.. ~Unless . . . you can get away with it . . . No! Bad! Change course of thoughts! Now!~  
  
"Remind me to chain you to the kitchen sink the next time you claim to have a brilliant idea," Lance exclaimed with an exasperated sigh. They had spent decidedly more time trying to find the way out than they had spent on getting lost.  
  
"Hey, my ideas are always great!" Pietro protested. "They don't always work out so good, but they're great!"  
  
"The last time you had a 'great idea' it took two hours to get all the toothpaste out of the carpet! Then there was that incident with the fan and the tomatoes. And do I _really_ have to mention the goldfish?"  
  
"Okay, okay," Pietro muttered, and made a face that was a cross between 'Poor me, I'm so unloved' and 'Stop nagging, I'm a genius and you're just too stupid to recognize my brilliantness'. But he decided to let the subject slip, seeing how Lance was in a grumpy mood at the moment.  
  
"You know, I don't think we've been here before," the grumpy teen in question said after they had walked in silence for a while.  
  
"Really? 'Cause . . . I think we have." Pietro looked around, then shrugged. "'Course, it all looks the same." Lance felt like banging Pietro's head against the wall.  
  
"You said you knew the way back!"  
  
"I said I _thought_ I _remembered_ the way back. There's a big difference."  
  
"Yeah, the difference between eventually finding the way out and being lost down here forever!"  
  
"Calm down, Lance. No one can be lost forever . . . or maybe you can down here. It is almost like one of those labyrinths where . . . uhm . . . people are lost forever."  
  
Lance really had to restrain himself from strangling Pietro at the moment  
  
"You said before we went down here that you had the whole thing planned."  
  
"I had! I had a flashlight, the map, a goal, and you to act like the responsible older brother."  
  
"That's all? That's not very good planning. I mean, didn't you even think about leaving marks or something along the way?"  
  
"Well . . . I did try the Hansel and Gretel thing at first, ya know, dropping coins at the ground."  
  
"Oh, so _that_ was what that noise was."  
  
"Yeah, what did you think?"  
  
"I don't know, I figured it came from your head or something."  
  
Pietro pouted and punched Lance's arm.  
  
"Besides, didn't Hansel and Gretel leave breadpieces or something like that?" Lance asked while rubbing his arm and scowling at the younger boy.  
  
"Yeah, but then the birds ate the bread, and they got lost anyways, so that didn't work. My idea was _so_ much better. It's just that . . . you know, we don't really have a lot of money, so I kinda ran out of it pretty fast."  
  
Lance frowned.  
  
"Ya know, Pietro, I really doubt there's birds down here."  
  
"No kidding! But there's probably lots of rats, and they also eat bread."  
  
"There's rats here?" Lance squeaked in a rather unmanly way, eyes darting around nervously.  
  
"Probably . . . Why?" Realization dawned upon the speedster. "Are you _afraid_ of rats, Lance?"  
  
Lance assumed a disdainful expression, which looked rather comical since he didn't managed to completely get rid of the scared one.  
  
"Of _course_ not! It's just that . . . I don't like them very much."  
  
"But Lance, we've got rats at home, too. Lots of 'em. And they don't seem to bother you."  
  
"It's different. Because then I know they're there, I know their approximate size, and I have a frying pan if I need one!" Lance said, getting more and more worked up.  
  
"Lance, calm down!" Pietro gave the older boy a worried look. "It'll be okay. We'll get out of here." But the other teen wouldn't listen.  
  
"I can't take this! I'm lost in a place with lots of germ infected things with sharp teeth, that might very well be the size of a dog and we won't ever get out of here alive and oh my God, I think I'm claustrophobic!" Lance promptly started hyperventilating.  
  
Pietro had never been one to pay much attention at school. Everyone else was so much slower that it became dull after ten seconds, and if he wanted to know something, he could easily (and quickly) read up on the subject himself. But he vaguely remembered something about the importance of calming down persons that was panicking as fast as possible, preferably by dividing their attention from the upsetting subject. Of course, this was probably completely wrong, something the white-haired boy had composed out of his own imagination and too many movies, but that didn't bother Pietro very much. Instead he grabbed Lance by the shirt, drew him closer, and firmly attached his lips to the other boy's.  
  
Lance immediately calmed down when Pietro's soft lips met his own mouth, forgetting all about rats and being lost. Instead he reveled in the sense of a warm body so close to his own, the way Pietro smelled of vanilla, and the feeling of their tongues wrestling. His hands moved over the shorter boy's body, memorizing the way it felt, even through layers of clothes. Suddenly there was something hard between them. Lance broke the kiss and looked down, realizing that Pietro still was holding the flashlight.  
  
"Wow," the flashlight-wielding boy in question breathed, a happy look on his face.  
  
"Wow indeed," Lance agreed. "But why did you do that? Not that I'm complaining or anything . . ."  
  
"I had to stop you from panicking and doing something bad."  
  
"I wasn't panicking," Lance pouted.  
  
"Of course you wasn't," Pietro replied, patting the older boy's arm in a patronizing way.  
  
"I just don't like rats!"  
  
"Yeah, I get that, but what's with the overreaction?"  
  
"Ya see, I read this story by Stephen King when I was a little kid, and the concept of big rats that ate humans seems to have stuck. And there's a _lot_ of people that's afraid of rats."  
  
Pietro just smiled. Lance glared at him, then decided to address a more important matter.  
  
"I think we should try an' find the way out of here before we starve to death. I'm starting to get hungry, and there's a _lot_ of different tunnels here. And what if we stay lost forever?!" The brown-eyed boy almost started panicking again. Pietro on the other hand stayed calm.  
  
"Don't worry. I told Todd where we were going, and if we're not back by midnight, he'll come here armed with flashlights and rope to find us."  
  
"Rope?" Lance asked bewildered, wondering if the speed demon had lost it completely.  
  
"Yeah, ya know, like Minotaurus, the labyrinth and stuff. So he won't get lost, too. 'Cause that kinda destroys the whole 'I'm here to save you' part, doesn't it?"  
  
"But." The brown-haired boy gave Pietro a questioning look. "Why didn't we use that? I mean, then we probably wouldn't have get lost."  
  
The younger boy coughed suspiciously and looked away.  
  
"Pietro . . . You planned this whole thing?"  
  
"Well . . . I told you that! Only . . . Ididn'tmentionthefactthatitallwasacleverplotjusttogetintoyourpants! But I didn't know about the rat-thing. Honest!"  
  
The earthmover gave the white-haired gypsy an amused look.  
  
"Reeeeeally . . ." he drawled, while Pietro avoided meeting his eyes at all cost. "So . . . You want to get into my pants?"  
  
Pietro coughed again.  
  
"I guess you could say that . . ."  
  
"You know . . . We still have some time before Todd gets here," Lance said after taking a quick look at his watch.  
  
"Oh . . . And how do you suggest we spend it?" Pietro asked, eyeing the older boy in a way that was saying exactly _how_ the speedster wanted to spend it. Lance grinned, taking a step closer to the other boy so that they were up close and personal again.  
  
"I think you know," he breathed in the shorter teen's ear, causing Pietro to shiver. "But loose the flashlight this time, can't exactly say that was comfortable."  
  
Pietro dropped the flashlight, ignoring the crash and instead trying to clean the inside of Lance's mouth with his tongue. While Lance was doing his best repaying the favor, he couldn't help but think that being lost wasn't such a bad thing, as long as there were some sort of diversion.  
  
  
  
  
  
The End  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Authors Ramblings: Yay! I wrote a slashy story! Finished it and all! So, how was it? Please review! It'll make me happy! And it might make me finish some of my other slash-stories. And yeah, I know this story sucks (no pun intended!) at times, but I really couldn't do any better. I worked on this for two weeks and some parts just _wouldn't_ connect. And the ending's pretty bad. I just can't write good endings! *cries* And when I finished writing a version I liked, the computer went black as it has a habit of doing. So I had to rewrite it. Oh well.  
  
I have no idea if Bayville High used to be a mental institution. In fact, I _really_ doubt it. But I think it kinda looks like my school, which was a mental institution (and is there another world for that? I keep repeating myself.) from 1935 to 1968. And I think that's cool. Sometimes. It's even rumored that we have mass graves somewhere around the cafeteria. And we do have culverts beneath the school (which goes all the way to a hospital in town, or so I've heard), which I've never been in. Well, sort of, once, when I was going to the musical room. (I _have_ been in the culverts beneath the hospital in Malmö. They're pretty much the same. Only more used.) But some of my almost-friends were talking about breaking into the culverts under school (which are being kept locked, so you can't get down there unless you're gonna shoot a film and gets the janitor to open up.) and go all the way to the hospital downtown, or something. This inspired me to write this story. I know, weird inspiration source.  
  
The title is a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. In case you wondered.  
  
The story Lance mentions (which made him afraid of rats) is "Night Shift" by Stephen King. It can be found in his short story-collection "Night Shift", which I really recommend. Stephen King rules! Yay!  
  
Disclaimer: Yeah, like I own anything. Stan Lee owns X-Men, right? I don't know. I own the story, and the culverts Pietro and Lance get lost in, as well as the purple leprechaun living there. Just so you know.  
  
Distribution: If ya want it, ya can have it. Just keep my name with it and let me know where it ends up. 


End file.
