Current location:	racecar wallpaper bedroom
Current mood:	blah
Current music:	Page/Plant - "When the World Was Young"
Entry tags:	fanfiction, juno

"I was hoping she was into hard drugs."
Juno owns my soul, so... yeah.

Title: Love-Hate Subtraction
Fandom: Juno
Rating: PG
Genre: General
Wordcount: 434
Summary: Juno says they have a love-hate relationship, but Paulie thinks one of the necessary components is missing.
Notes: Random. Post-movie.



“I think I’ve decided that I hate you,” Juno announces as she strums his unplugged semi-hollow.


Paulie barely looks up from his notes (negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared…). “Why?”


“Because you can just sit there and study without being hopped up on three different ADHD pills. I mean, how can you not be distracted?” She motions to the walls. “Just look at all this rad racecar wallpaper you’ve got going on. It’s totally fascinating.”


He stretches out one of his legs and flips the page over in his binder. “I’m sorry.”


“And that too!” she exclaims, banging out an E7 chord to prove her frustration. Paulie winces. He’s always hated seventh chords. “You actually apologize. You act like it’s easy or something. Do you know how hard it is for me to swallow my plus-size ego and say I’m sorry?”


“I’ll stop apologizing. And I’ll put up some less exciting wallpaper.”


“And you always try to fix things,” she goes on, as it’s obviously become her quest to find everything that shouldn’t be right about him but is anyway. “I’m lazy. It’s kind of annoying when you do all this stuff I can’t do without thinking about it twice.” She glances at the racecars. “Keep the wallpaper. It’s cool in a retro geek sense.”


Paulie nods. “I’ll keep the wallpaper.”


She turns away from the racecars and looks at him. “You know, I don’t think I actually hate you.”


“Well, that’s good. At least I think so.”


“I’m just really jealous of you,” she finishes, absent-mindedly finger-picking the beginning of some White Album song. “I know I’ve said this like a thousand times before, but you’re naturally the most awesome dude since Johnny Rotten, and it’s a bit irritating.”


He decides to play along and affects a half-serious face. “Sounds like you’re better off without me.”


“Nope,” Juno says, shaking her head. “Because I kept thinking about you in Spanish the other day and I maybe dozed off a little and then the next day Señora Gringa decided to lay a pop quiz over the present imperfect on us and I completely bombed it.” She pointed the guitar at him like a gun. “All your fault.”


“I guess you’re stuck with me,” he replies. “Sucks for you. You’re trapped in a loveless relationship.”


“I never said that,” she counters, staring at him in a way that makes his throat close up and his neck start to itch. “I’ve got a love-hate attitude towards you.”


“But you already said you really don’t hate me,” Paulie muses.


Juno just smiles.