Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Barbarians in Rome ❯ Death of Remus ( Chapter 1 )

Trowa received word via secured e-mail of his newest mission, encrypted in its usual way from the anonymous source he secretly knew was any one of the doctors involved with making the gundanium suits that now waged guerrilla war on Earth against the oppressive Alliance and OZ. He himself had only met the man who had overseen the creation of his own mobile suit, the Heavyarms, and only rumors had reached his ears of the other doctors, most of them from the occasional comment the other pilots would make on the scientist they had known specifically. Duo was the most vocal about his mentor, but he was just the most vocal of the group in general. It was Doctor J, the man who had put Heero in charge of the Wing Gundam, who came up most often in conversations, however few they were between all the pilots. Apparently, the old man had been keeping up his interference in the war while the others seemed to disappear into the woodwork for the time being, letting their respective pilots wreck their decisive havoc for them.

The message sent from Doctor S came directly through his Gundam’s frequency and instructed him to depart from his current position and rendezvous with the other pilots at a safehouse in Reims from which all five would operate from for their next series of missions. There was a no-questions-asked hotel where the five would be welcomed without a background check, which was a rare occurrence in an increasingly vigilant Europe and an increasing necessity for the notorious pilots. Of course, they would all be arriving at different times and staying in assorted different rooms.

For example, it was also mentioned in the letter that he was to expect a ‘business partner’ and make a reservation for two. Even though they had only met a few months ago and often been scattered about on various missions, if the other pilots should arrive before him, it would be safe to assume that Heero and Duo would have their own room already armed to the teeth with guns and scopes underneath the mattresses. Trowa may not have boasted a significant social competence, but he was certainly not blind. He could easily sniff out traitors; he could sense a certain partiality between them with even greater ease.

Wufei would be defending his solitary peace in his own room and that serenity would not be broken until he left for a mission, his meditation time leaving him anxious to fight. That would leave the only possible roommate to be Quatre, pilot of the Sandrock Gundam. It was not an unpleasant experience to share space with such a generally good-natured guy, and as far as he was concerned, each pilot was decent enough to get along with, though each still had their own shortcomings, including himself. He had needed only to sit for fifteen minutes with the brash American pilot to be told that he was even quieter than Heero and just as aloof with a mild huff and a rolling of the eyes.

But Quatre also shared, aside from piloting, an affinity and a talent for music that had made it easier from the beginning to cooperate. That’s what Trowa appreciated most. Unlike some of the others, the blonde pilot had always understood that if he were to talk to Trowa, he would most likely be participating in a sometimes heavily one-sided conversation and still he continued. Yes, as the other pilots preferred their peace, in Wufei’s case, or their talkative partners, in Heero’s case, he preferred the company of the pilot that he had met first, the one he worked the best with. Once the message had been transmitted safely, he shut down the computer and set to work on packing up the small base of operations he’d created for his last mission. He began gathering all his weapons, his equipment, and his mobile suit and departed for Reims only half an hour later.

The blonde pilot arrived a day later at the Grand Royal—a deceptive name; the accommodations anything but grand and the shifty neighborhood not an ounce royal in any manner—and knocked on the door.

This was after the other pilots had already been settled, and Duo could often be found flittering around the halls like shadow when Heero was particularly unresponsive and peeking his head into the other pilots’ rooms habitually. Expecting either the aforementioned American or a civilian, Trowa put away his knives and answered the door in his usual taciturn manner. There stood Quatre, with his own pack of supplies slung over his shoulder. It made him look like a young runaway fleeing from his parents, and in reality, Trowa knew he was, though he had not yet told him his complete history. His eyes promptly embraced Trowa in a friendly way and he greeted him a bright hello. Trowa returned the sentiment with his characteristic resolute nod and stepped aside to let him inside. He shut the door after one last wary glance down the halls and a glimpse of Duo flitting back to the room at the end of the hall where Heero would be holed up preparing mission parameters for the next few nights.

The first wave of reconnaissance would be handled that night, mastered by the resident sneak, Duo, and the consecutive nights would a combination of raiding and all out attack, the latter of the two options to be carried out by Heero and Wufei and directed by the tactical analyst of the pilots, Quatre. Trowa’s position would be alongside the remaining pilot, flitting through the other buildings, using the chaos created by the Gundams’ abrupt assault as their cover.

This type of shock and steal tactic was one of the traits the guerrillas from the colonies were known and often loathed for, mostly to the lethal effect to which they used it. The Gundam pilots were not unfamiliar with this situation, but for the duration of the war thus far, their interactions as an entire, cohesive group had been extremely rare and during those times, they’d often been separated from each other while operating on one collective mission. This was a strange occasion, and all the of the more aloof pilots were getting used to company that knew of their agenda as well in proximity, and the more sociable ones were rejoicing to have a warm body in the room to talk to, when most missions put them in isolation or hiding.

Despite all the horrors of life they’d all inevitably endured during the course of war, it couldn’t change the fact that they were still only teenagers or make them any less emotionally affected by all they saw, no matter how strong their respective, varied façades implied that it didn’t. Trowa could realize this and even see it in himself, though he could not see how it could or ever would change. Of course, he rarely looked at himself in the mirror—and definitely not today, when he had someone to carry a conversation with, as untalkative as he may have outwardly been.

No, for the day, for a day in his life that could end only the next morning, if there should be a turn of fortune, he spent his time in that hotel room with Quatre. There was no need for immediate preparation for the mission—Heero was taking care of the burden for the first night, with impatient American busying himself with either a comic or an Edgar Allen Poe book he’d stolen from the last mission, while hiding in a private school—so they had sat down and the blonde pilot had quickly made a batch of coffee, complaining of the long drive. It was rather bland and he commented on it, but Trowa had never calibrated himself to finer things, living on L-3 as a child mercenary. So, it didn’t make much difference to him if it was ground coffee or hot water and dirt; he could make due with either.

"This war feels like it may never end," Quatre murmured as he lifted the paper cup to his mouth. Once he’d taken a gingerly sip at it, finding it still much too hot, he glanced back up to Trowa and smiled mildly.

"Do you ever get the impression that maybe this will be the end of the world, Trowa? Maybe it’s selfish of me, to think I’m the only one suffering with it, but honestly," he paused with a sad little smile, "this war is tearing both the Earth and the Colonies apart by the seams. By the time we accomplish this peace, there might not be anything left to be saved."

"Indeed," Trowa answered plainly. "In time, it could turn out to be an unwitting apocalypse."

The blonde pilot laughed smoothly. "Allah would be very irritated if Man destroyed his creation before he could do it himself."

"Most likely."

"And then he would create Man again, civilizations would rise again, and they would give birth to new wars and a people who didn’t know of its horrors."

"Aa." Trowa, always the one to be precise and calculated with his movements and with the precious little time he had left before his luck ran out, drank the coffee without hesitation. The steam trails rising from it were highlighted by the light streaming in through the shutters. "But a collective memory of war doesn’t matter to Man. As soon as he is provoked, he will forget of all the pain that comes with the fight and have to learn it all over again."

"That’s true," Quatre said, shrugging while his fingers tapped quaintly around the paper cup. "It’s a part of the human condition—to forget the lessons he’s learned." After a sigh and another careful sip, he opened his mouth again. "Praise be to Allah, but sometimes I wish that he had not made us a race of fools."

Trowa’s face retained its perpetual levelheaded expression, though his voice conveyed more of his amusement. The slit, striped light that seeped into their transitory haven cast an almost smirking expression to his green eyes. "A race of fools and sages."

The other pilot chuckled and gazed back, contented with the genuine response.

"One weight to balance the other, thus preserving the world," he added with a heartening smile. "Perhaps He had a idea of what he was doing after all," murmured Quatre enigmatically, with a certain melodious light playing over his blond hair and elegant young face that housed a mind of many more years. "Would you like some more, Trowa?"

A time after that, after the slit sunlight had dimmed and traveled across the carpet and onto the wall opposite the window and after the first two pilots disappeared, off to execute the first phase of the week-long mission, Quatre was roused from the pre-Colony book he had been immersed in to answer the door in the same necessarily cautious manner that Trowa had, though the possibility of it being Duo simply strolling the corridors was highly unlikely at this hour. He hesitated, folding his hand over the back of the book as he closed to reserve his place, and sat up in the chair silently, eyeing the door. Trowa was carefully picking the weapons apart and cleaning them thoroughly in the bathroom at the moment, the door closed as another paranoia that was unfortunately a necessity for Gundam Pilots. At the faint noise of the unobtrusive knock, the Heavyarms pilot lifted his head, wary like an old, seasoned wolf. From behind the door, he listened intently, a gun held in his hand, half-dismantled, while came the faint sounds of Quatre rising from his chair. He set the thick book with the gold-dusted edges down on the bed as he passed, noiselessly but quickly.

He reached the door and again there was a cautious knock, this time paired with a voice. "Open up, Carpenter, it’s the Walrus."

Quatre disengaged the lock and opened the door with a bright smile descending on Wufei’s face. He remained neighborly even while he slipped into the more sinister tone of the pilots’ cryptic code language, the one that might merit them a few odd looks, but also would keep their operations obscure to eavesdropping ears. "Good evening, Walrus. Is it time to talk of many things?"

"Yes, of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot," Wufei answered cryptically and with much less enthusiasm for the outlandish lines.

"The night is fine, but do you admire the view?"

"I think I saw a bed of oysters; I will take a walk along the briny beach to find them."

"I’m hungry, too," Quatre said, his tone quieting and stiffening up in his usual brand of heart-on-sleeve concern. "Should I go with you?"

"No, I’ll be fine," the Chinese pilot answered succinctly, his hand clasped around an easily concealed knife, before he gave the blonde a brief, respectful nod that Quatre returned and turned and melted into the shadow down the hallway.

After he had disappeared, Quatre flashed a glance down the corridor in each direction before withdrawing back to the hotel room, locking the door, and returning to the chair where he had sat. This time he left the novel lying idly on the bed, passed over with a gravely cautious expression occupying the Arabian pilot’s face, as he reached over to the bedside table and riffled through it briefly. Pushing aside a King James Bible and a spare Magnum, a common find in a Gundam pilot hideout, he collected up the walkie-talkie that lay there, already calibrated to Heero’s frequency, who was currently acting as Duo’s backup, a watchful distance from the Oz base, and struck the button with his thumb, holding it up to his mouth.

"This is the Carpenter calling the March Hare. March Hare, do you copy?"

A brief, harsh crunch of static awaited as Heero answered promptly, responding with his faithful monotone from miles away. His tone was not acidic or brusque, so the mission was either going well or had not commenced yet. "Affirmative. Go ahead."

"The Walrus is following a white rabbit. Please use caution and alert the Mad Hatter; I have a suspicion the Queen of Hearts may have an idea of our location—"

Abrupt silence followed, penetrated only once by the crackle of static as the walkie-talkie spoke up again, briefly transmitting the sound of the distant pilot’s voice before it, too, found a death in silence. At that, the entire hotel room, which had once been palpably filled with the energy that came with young terrorists at work, became deathly still. Noise was much less dangerous than silence in some situations, and this was one of them. That was why Trowa suddenly stood at the bathroom door, eyes so icy his green irises were almost cold gray, so silent that it was if he didn’t exist. The knife held, however, was gleaming, long, very much real, and had only been sharpened a few hours ago. Silence was a threat of death in this context, and Trowa was instantly on guard.

Quatre did not make another sound as to indicate that he was still even there, and Trowa could not see from where he was standing, the bathroom ajar halfway. The modest hotel room (modest was a flattering word for it) opened into a narrow hall with a cramped closet embedding in the wall and a door opening to the bathroom. That short hallway continued, broken up only by the meager dresser to the left side, facing the remainder of the room, which spread out to the right, bathed in the gawky light from rather yellow, flickering lightbulbs. From where Trowa stood, he could not see into the room where he’d last heard Quatre’s voice, followed shortly by an eerie silencing.

Eerie would have been the word for it, had he not know that someone was there. This was an attack. It was defensive behavior for his life that caused Trowa’s eyes to dart quickly to the inconspicuous glimpse of clothing he could see inside the open closet. He lifted his knife, gripping it blade out away from him, moved forward in silence, and lunged in to slit the throat of the man trying to conceal himself there. He had no time to react, to hurl himself out of the way; Trowa was far too fast for that and the unknown enemy could not even open his mouth before blade cut him and he slumped against the wall, propped up by the wooden bench wedged against his legs in the closet.

The killing was silent, and Trowa prepared to go after the comrades he knew were there but had no idea he had heard, but there had been a gun in the man’s hand. As death took him quickly at No-Name’s blade, the muscles gripping it went slack and it clattered significantly to the carpet.

Literally instants later, a blur of civilian clothes lurched up from behind the dresser, wielding firepower no normal civilian would have carried, let alone been able to operate. A standard military rifle was whipped to the man’s shoulder, and just as Trowa whipped his head around, the crack of gunshot rang out, accusing and lethal in one fell swoop.

The warring silence dissolved when Trowa, still clutching the knife embellished in a man’s blood, fell to the floor, as motionless as a bag of bones. From somewhere, his own crimson blood began collecting in a disturbing puddle around his head.

Two other men, each wielding his own standard-issue weapon on their hip and contrasting it with their horribly average-looking garb, had the other pilot by the body and the legs, wrestling him down as he thrashed with all the fury of a trapped wolf. Quatre was screaming viciously into his captor’s gag, sending his vicious heel and elbow into any soft part he could reach, and simultaneously watching the blood gather around the still body of his comrade with widening eyes.

If death had a soundtrack, Trowa was sure that it did not consist of a constant rhythmic beeping that could have been only one thing, even in the current sluggish black haze that was the Heavyarm pilot’s mind at the time. As soon as he could realize in his heavy, hurting head that he had his precious consciousness back, he automatically began to take inventory of damages taken. Unlike many other young men who suffered such an injury as Trowa feared he had, who might have been submersed in fear and vulnerable confusion, he was oriented enough and had seen enough death to mentally recover in a matter of seconds. He could feel pain, yes, he told himself, but it was nothing inhibiting. Actually, it was rather mild and he couldn’t have told it apart from a mild headache. Nothing to stop him. He could feel dim pain, a general feeling of lightness and overall comfort which indicated some sort of bed, and he could sense light coming in through his eyelids, so he had not been blinded either.

Nor was he deaf. While keeping his eyes closed, feigning sleep, he listened to the second noise that had been there from his point of consciousness, along side the metronome-like heart-monitor beeping. Thin paper was being turned and a deep, calm male voice pausing while it flipped and continuing into his reading as fluidly as water, utterly comfortable. It was a reading from the Bible, Trowa suddenly realized, as he recognized the familiar ominous verse of Revelations. It’d been a favorite particular book for the mercenaries of L-3 to quote in dark conversations or dire straits.

From what he could tell, there was no one else in the room and he could not assess the situation and the proper course of escape to take if he had been captured, so he opened his eyes. Simple enough, but to absorb the image he saw took a little more effort than that. The voice that he had heard was indeed male, but it had been so calm, almost quietly reserved that the last person he would have connected it to was the boisterous Duo Maxwell, but there he sat nonetheless.

He wore a pressed, cleaned, crisp shirt that was as sterilely white as the whitewashed hospital walls and the unwrinkled sheets that lay over his own legs. Trowa noticed instantly with a certain sensation of sur-reality that the only hint of black the American had was in the cover of the Bible he recited rhythmically from, almost a sort of verbal meditation. He’d never seen the lack of black on the Deathscythe pilot; it was such a strange sight suspicion began creeping into him and he glanced him over again, critical for anything out-of-the-ordinary. A cross lay around his neck—he’d vehemently denied the existence of God the few times their conversations had gotten to the touchy subject of religion. He screamed on the battlefield his dark relation to the only God he could believe in, the one of Death. His hair was gone, too. Not just tucked away, as it often would be for uninhibited mobility on certain missions, simply shaved off. It appeared to be a few weeks of growth after a good and thorough military-style buzzcut.

That brought up the issue of how long Trowa had laid there unconscious. His mind, running like a frantic computer, was trying to incur impossible facts in determining just how the hell he’d gotten to this point and if there was an immediate need to escape. Duo’s shaven hair immediately had thrown him off. At the last he’d seen the American, a glimpse of him flittering down the halls, and the braid had roughly measured off at three feet and the emotional attachment to that appendage would have dragged on the floor if it were physical. He looked younger in a sense that it accentuated his large eyes, but he seemed inevitably older without his long hair. He did not have time to contemplate what in the warring world could have spurred the proud pilot to cut his locks; this shockingly different Duo had finally realized his consciousness and tore his eyes from the Bible and folded it in his lap, smiling reservedly.

"Good morning. How are you feeling?"

The tone quiet and passive, it fueled the fire of wary suspicion in the newly awoken pilot. For the moment, he decided that his silence was precious and only responded with an affirming grunt.

Duo nodded happily. "That’s good. You’ve been asleep for quite a well, you know. You gave us a big scare. We were all sure that you’d actually bit the bullet," he informed calmly to Trowa, sitting in a chair beside the narrow hospital bed.

He chuckled, his posture flawless and his mannerisms cautious, almost shy. Acting? Why? No sensible Gundam pilot alive would have actually taken injured to the hospital, where forms and bloodchecks often endangered more than it saved. Though, Trowa reasoned, he had been shot in the head, and as far he could tell, narrowly survived it. And if this was acting on Duo’s part, it was unbelievably believable. Suspicions kept rising and Trowa began cautiously placing glances around the room, eyeing the open door to the hallway when Duo blinked.

"How long?" Trowa spoke up finally, when Duo only gazed at him silently, his features thrown into sudden harsh, masculine contrast by the unforgiving haircut, making his eyes all the more confusing in their softness, their innocence. It was practical naiveté shining there, and Duo had never boasted that particular trait in all his tirades about Death as he destroyed mobile suit after another.

"About three days now," he answered, folding his hands together. "That’s officially the longest any of us have been out of commission. I have to say that not everybody else is proud of that achievement. You’ll probably have to watch yourself for a while."

Trowa tried to speak again, with calculated precision, when his gravelly voice broke for a moment, reminding him that it had indeed been three days since he’d been awake or touched a glass of water. Duo promptly handed him the one that had been sitting on the bedside table, water beading down the side. While he drank it, the other pilot stood up from the chair and smiled softly down at him. When he finished, he quickly found himself relieved of the glass and Duo took it, replaced the chair to it’s normal place, and stood by the bed for a moment, just gazing with those soft eyes.

"You’ll be alright again in no time. The doctors said that your injuries were serious, but you’ll be recovering from them very soon, so you don’t have to worry about that. The blow you took to the head was blunt, but powerful. You might have suffered a little swelling or possible damage to your brain, but it was rather minor since you had been wearing your helmet. They said it did less damage than one night’s worth of hard drinking." Duo smiled gently, without the sharp hook of a grin. "You’ll be released tomorrow if all goes well. Until then, I had better get out of here. I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place, but no matter what the others said, I just couldn’t believe it was right to leave you alone. But now that you’re awake and aware, I think you can fare by yourself, right?"

Trowa was still highly suspicious of this strange new Maxwell fabrication and his dedication to this shy character of his. Yet, something still seemed fundamentally wrong. He did not betray another word and another nod sufficed Duo.

"Alright," he said with a content sigh. "I’d better be off now. In the meantime, get well soon."

From his hand, Duo opened up the Bible one more time and moved the bookmark from the apocalyptic Book of Revelations to somewhere within the center of the book and put it on the bed beside Trowa’s hand.

"I’ll let you have this for now. Give you something to do. I think a little Psalms might do the trick for you. I’ll see you later. Quatre will have my head on a stick if knows I came here to see you against his specific orders." He nodded as if there was absolutely nothing strange about uttering that sentence, offered another sweet, mousy smile to the wary Trowa, and turned to exit the room. Again, the absence of the characteristic hair was highly abnormal and borderline unrealistic, and now, paired with the highly polished military shoes and pale, professional khakis, made the mirage doubly estranging from his normal character. His sleeves were no longer rolled to the elbow, another facet to his personality stark in contrast when absent. He shook off the thought that there was a hint of bruised purple on the back of his hand as he turned as a mistake of his eyes.

He wished, in his dully throbbing head, that he could blame the abnormal Duo Maxwell on a simple trick of the light, or a bad chemical in his medication, but he couldn’t.

This was something you didn’t just ignore. It was something Trowa didn’t want to ignore, and at the moment, sitting in a hospital bed, he had plenty of time to let the worry grow.

There was no immediate danger in the building, as far as Trowa could tell, and he was famed amongst the pilots for having a certain knack for simply learning to go with the flow of a new surrounding or group of people and fade into the woodwork. He knew exactly how to remain inconspicuous even when he was the only other person in the room. It was not difficult to sort out the pulse of the hospital operations and it did not show signs of any militaristic influence. The most obvious sign—no soldiers came into his tiny, starch white room, seeking to kill a Gundam pilot while he was good and helpless. He assumed for a moment that Duo would have warned him had there been any imminent danger, possibly freed him from his hospital prison as he had to Heero, but he remembered his strange behavior with an inexplicable, opaque worry.

There was no IV to be seen or felt, so Trowa cautiously sat up and let his legs dangle over the edge of the narrow bed, flexing his muscles, making sure he still functioned well enough to make an emergency exit, should the necessity arise. To his back, a thin white hospital curtain had been raised, separating him from the other patients, and now their breathing could be detected beneath their own respective sets of equipment. It was not an intensive care unit, and the door was near, so the temptation to liberate himself grew even stronger.

But that unfathomable behavior from his comrade had rattled his perception of the situation enough to keep him there for a moment, tasting the air with all his senses, trying to find the danger that kept him back, and failing. His mouth had been set in a jaggedly frustrated line and he stared at the door, unlocked, and finally pushed himself away from the bed. With mind made up, he moved swiftly and managed to rummage the room and recover some of his clothes from the sterile, whitewashed cabinet set against the opposing wall.

At least, they had been near his bed, implying they had been his. Trowa did not question the rather alternative black pants, decorated with a smallpox-epidemic of holes, and the deep purple trench coat and battered leather boot that came with for the simple fact that he did not have the time. The ostentatious, even ridiculous boots could not have been useful for any kind of stealthy operation, or one that consisted of any considerable physical activity; they were awkwardly heavy and littered with metal chains that gave away position with the slightest movement.

Trowa, however, left little room for his own questioning, instead channeling his energy toward his departure. Face neutral and unassuming, therefore less noticeable, he did not get as far as turning the doorknob before it rattled and twisted beneath his hand. The shadow on the opposite side of the opaque glass appeared abruptly, moving with a sinisterly familiar swiftness, and he had little time to adapt before it had opened on him. He prepared for movement, though whether it would flight or fight eluded him for the moment; the seasoned wolf was tensing.

"Barton," the voice intoned disapprovingly, incredibly coming from none other than the Walrus, a sour-faced Chang Wufei grimacing at him. He kept the door open, seemingly completely off his guard. "You up already?"

Trowa did not know what had caused this sudden polar shift in the fellow pilots, what could make Duo Maxwell pick up a razor and sheer off his signature braid without remorse and Chang Wufei to dress in the casual American garb of naïve civilians, and honest shock took him for a moment. They never used real names; aliases for Gundam pilots could run for pages and were used exclusively whenever in public, if not totally exclusively. Rarely did true names slip past their lips. And this casual infraction was almost disgustingly casual, as if the Chinese pilot truly did not care if their names carried to the wrong set of ears.

He stepped inside, the door open and letting a tiny draft in from the corridor, and slung an arm akimbo on his hip. "That’s a surprise. On your feet already? Usually, you’d be the one to limp around for sympathy, but I guess this proves me wrong," Wufei said, a distinct slang to his inflection. He squinted, tilting his head, accentuating how his hair had also been cut short and seemed perpetually disheveled. "What’s wrong, Barton? Can’t shut you up normally."

Mentally unhitched by these unfathomable changes, Trowa hesitated, though he managed to keep an unreadable face up. "Nothing’s wrong."

"You’re still awful quiet. Do you really think you should be walking around?" Wufei shifted his weight so he rested against the wall, the door still open. That one alien behavior of not closing it for privacy kept jumping out at him, adding to a growing sense of abnormality.

"Yeah, I’m fine. I just want to get out of here, that’s all." Trowa was quickly realizing that Wufei for some reason expected him to be as talkative as he ‘usually was.’ He was also quickly beginning to think he’d lost his mind completely.

"Hmm," the other pilot grunted. "I understand. Hospitals are a little creepy after a while, if you ask me. Besides, it’s probably just the brain damage getting to you." He laughed heartily, carelessly.

He did not give notice to the people moving in the hallway behind them. He did not act like any sane pilot would, had he been involved in war and death as long as all of them had. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d gone insane.

Or maybe he was just in Hell. It was an option at this point, if Duo would read Holy Scripture, if Wufei would lower himself to languishing in slang, if he himself would have ever bought such conspicuous, frivolous boots of his own free will—then the netherworld could have dropped below freezing point while he lay there unconscious for all he knew.

"Alright, if you’ve got so much energy, Barton," Chang said, his face twisted into an foreign expression, a smirk that seemed to have transferred to him from 02, "let’s get your sorry ass back to Central. They’re not gonna be happy to pay your bills for your little stint, especially after how you got knocked down by a novice Fang like that. They might take your suit from you."

"My suit—?"

He clapped the taller pilot on the shoulder; Trowa felt it more as another scorching inconsistency burning to his suspicions and beginning to blur the lines of sanity in his mind. "Don’t get worked up, though. Just lie. Tell ‘em that you’ve suffered one knock to the head too many and you’ll recover eventually. Maybe then you’ll get to keep that pile of junk to get knocked out another day." He laughed again, so throaty and juvenile.

"Sure," Trowa grunted.

"Alright. Hurry it up, then. I got a meeting in less than hour with our Alliance supervisors and it’s gonna take half of that to drive you back to Central Administration."

In a clipped, impatient tone, he snapped at Trowa to get a move on when the pilot remained where he stood for a moment, helpless but to stare a little, still unable to get his head around any of the information he’d just received. Wufei made a slightly threatening face and cleared his throat, making some comment Trowa didn’t catch, and walked out the door without so much as a glance around at the people in the corridor.

With no choice but to follow, he slipped out the door and made himself to be just as wary as ever, though with every step the jangling of chains on his boots haunted him and something thick and unbreathable was settling into his mind. He was coming to see something very wrong, though it was not visible yet. The wisest option to shield himself from this unseen terror was to analyze it, not go wildly attacking it. And this thing, this unseen agent of discord that had seized control of reality, did not confront him. It only followed, a horrible doppelganger in his head, as Trowa followed the shorthaired Wufei. The other pilot continued his trek, walking so blindly as only an oblivious civilian would, and abruptly began talking about nothing of real importance, his hands balled in his pockets.

They passed through the lobby and strolled past the reception desk. Well, the first pilot strolled, and the second one, recently freed from his constricting bed of recovery, stalked with malcontent as every step sounded obnoxiously. He focused on the nurses who busied behind the counter, analyzing their faces in habit, a wolf sniffing for signs of the enemy pack, and one of them lifted their head. She set eyes on Trowa, and obviously recognized him as the patient he was, and nearly opened her mouth. Wufei beat her to it and nodded in their direction. It was a slight, negligent movement that belittled his normal integrity.

"I’m just picking up one of the boys, Clara," he explained. "Sign him off the list, will you? I’ve gotta get him back to Central Administration before we catch hell for it." He smiled perfunctorily and pressed on. But Trowa could not shake it off quiet as easily when one of the girls waved and bid him a goodbye by name. His head was making terrible sweeps of his mind and trying to figure out what was just so radically misshapen with reality.

By Duo’s account, it had been only three days since he’d been admitted in this hospital. How long had it been since Reims? He did not have a wound from the bullet he’d taken—no, not even a sign the significant injury had ever been there. It could not have healed without some remnant without considerable time. Where did that place him? Within weeks or within months? There was no continuity to this time line if he was to believe his wound had healed before he had been admitted and that he’d been fully unconscious for all that time. Trowa had no way of knowing just yet and something kept him from inquiring his comrades.

He might have, had he been able to recognize them. The young man walking before him was deceiving, and the other pilot had been baffling. There was a sudden loss of logic to his surroundings. He watched every one in the hospital as sharply as he could, trying to find answers to questions he had not asked aloud, until Wufei led them to the door. He paused to wait for Trowa to catch up. The expression on his face, beyond the implausible smirk he wore, was that of a disdainful impatience. It was a little more familiar, but still distressingly strange.

"You’re slowing down," he told him as they hesitated, awaiting the automatic doors to slide open. His dark eye was turned on Trowa, critical. "That concussion must have rattled something out of your head for good, I think."

"Concussion?"

Wufei looked at him incredulously then scoffed. "That White Fang punk really must have hit you harder than the doctors thought. You’re really out of it, Barton," he laughed, clapping the taller pilot on the shoulder just before heading out into the parking lot. "You’re not fit for a battlefield, let alone a piloting a Gundam! You’d better not let the Prime Minister of L-1 catch wind of your incompetence. He’d pick us off as soon as look at us and lucky you, he’s going to be in town today. Watch your back."

Trowa was still unable to grasp this new reality. The seasoned wolf kept his nose to the air, suspicious, but he followed the strange scent. It covered his entire territory.

"There’s little left to do," a voice uttered despairingly. "We suffered too many causalities in a simple attack involving only one of the Alliance’s suit, and we still did not manage to kill its pilot." The lighting was not good in the cramped chamber, a hurried, secretive meeting place, but it still illuminated the resigned expression on the man’s face as he spoke. The grimy yellow light from the single bulb discolored his damaged platinum blonde hair to a dismal shade more appropriate for his ruined attitude. "We must give up this futile endeavor. You said yourself violence was the only way to settle this, and now that option has proved worthless!"

His associate, the one he had been addressing solely, sat on the opposing side of the room, keeping distance and disdain between them. The blade of knife was flashing repeated as it was wiped clean. It gleamed sick, tainted yellow. "Shut up," the other voice growled in return, a harsh perversion of a female voice twisted by fury. "Fucking coward you are, what do you know about war? True war? You have no spine."

The sound of the girl spitting in disgust was not overcome by the whir of ventilation fans on the ceiling. She angrily asserted her militant boot into a nearby crate, causing it to splinter and spill the contents of an old rice supply out across the floor. The one she sat on was not filled with food; she rested on top of an accumulation of weapons, still stained from the blood of their former owners.

"One does not need to be a strategist to see our weak position. We are through," the male voice reasserted. "I have the faced the fact; you won’t relinquish your weapons or your foolishness."

"You talk damn pretty, don’t you?" she hissed back. "You've caved in and accepted your flaw as a soft pansy of a man. You accept this world and the bastards running it. I don’t."

"You’re suicidal! You’re—"

"I’m the leader! If you doubt me, leave or sacrifice yourself in battle! You were the first to follow me, so be the first to die for me, not the first to betray!" Her knife sliced through air and stabbed into the crate beneath her. "That’s my word, and my word is the fucking law here. Shut up and fight, leave, or die."

"There is nothing left to do, Dorothy—We have lost."

"I cannot lose. If I defeat the Alliances’ suits, then I have won my freedom over them. If that Colony-spawned scum manages to kill me, then I have won my freedom from them. And I will fight to the death—either their death or mine." She stood up abruptly, and the man, a wilted shell of a man who withered further and further as his weak body was giving out, in midst of a war, just watched timidly. She wrenched the knife from the crate and sheathed it, her voice hardening with ice.

"Gather whoever is left over from the battle. Tell them to stay out of sight until I give the signal. I’ll give them some time to recover, but they must be ready to give a final strike without reservation for their lives. If they truly want this war, they will die. Fuck the pigs—we will get them one way or another. Even if we can only take away their chance to oppress us further." Before she could manage to storm out of the small warehouse chamber, a certain bloodlust in her exhausted eyes, the other man spoke up, peering over the rims of his splintered glasses.

"And—?"

She hesitated at the door, the yellow light falling sinisterly over her back and her blood-darkened, matted short hair. Her body stiffened, seething. "Bury Treize where the sons of bitches won’t find him." Then she left.

There was a soldier in the front seat of the car. Wufei had led the newly released pilot out into the parking lot and he’d stopped at the only vehicle in that particular row, a polished, sinfully black towncar. Instead of climbing into the driver’s seat, he situated himself in the back and Trowa, for lack of comprehension, imitated the action; the safest option at this point. That’s when he noticed it was a soldier in the front seat. His body did not stiffen, at the command of his mind. He wouldn’t let himself show his sudden nervousness. Wufei stretched out casually as the Alliance soldier started the car and pulled out of the lot, heaving an oblivious sigh and grumbling about the time constraints.

If Trowa’s mind had been given to reeling, it would have done so. But he refused to let himself be thrown off guard. It was too strange and dangerous to let himself be weak for a moment. Sitting silently in the seat, he began to try to piece together fragments of the circumstance, watching the empty parking lot. The sunlight was golden and bright. This was Earth. The vegetation fringing the large hospital compound was radically different from that of Reims. This was someplace far south of France. There was an Alliance soldier in the front seat. This was impossible.

The car had just pulled out of the hospital’s parking lot and accelerated out onto the road leading away from it, breezing through the security point at the end of the drive and out onto a highway. The horizon was expanding into a similarly foreign expanse of terrain and Trowa’s logic was being stretched to its limit as it did so. He watched the landscape pass and his understanding dwindle. How long had been since Reims? What had happened?

"Can’t you drive any faster, asshole?" the aforementioned pilot barked suddenly, frowning sourly at the soldier steering. He sat up straighter in the seat beside Trowa, as if preparing to physically hit the subordinate. "Let’s get there sometime today, alright? I’d like to keep my position if you don’t mind."

"Yes, General Chang."

"What’s that?" he snapped.

"Yessir, General Chang," the older man replied, with a stiffness in his tone.

"That’s much better." The young Chinese man then basked in his own contented smirk and tossed up a foot to sling over the other, showing off his ostentatious taste of polished boots. Sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles and arms across his chest, he turned that leer toward Trowa. "It’s too bad you’re only a Lieutenant, Barton. You’d do well with secondary officers—hell, maybe even better than you are now."

He lifted an eyebrow over the smirk and turned away to glance out the window at the sweeping, classical cityscape that spread out around them. The sun did not reflect off these classically Latin terra cotta buildings, but it seared the eye as soon as it looked toward the gleaming modern city nestled in the center. The edges were crumbling, the buildings slowly falling into neglect. The air was thick with the sense of history dying beneath metallic foot. It looked like a blemish of a city, starkly industrial in comparison to the elder structures rimming it. It was an ugly, renowned, hustling city. It was a city flanked by mobile suit factories on either sides and otherwise ensnared by the surrounding mountains. Even they seemed to look down on the insolent technology with a disdainful frown.

From beside him, he listened to the General scoff heartily and felt him boyishly punch him in the shoulder. "What’s the matter with your head, now, Barton? You look like you’ve never seen Rome before."