Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Les Ombres Rebelles ❯ Chapter 4

Les Ombres Rebelles - Chapter Four

 

by danse

 

~*~

 

Doctor J was reading a budget report at his desk when his intercom beeped. He pressed the button. “Yes, what is it, Ms. Moneypenny?”

 

“It's 2:30, sir. Mr. Barton has arrived for his meeting with you.”

 

J's eyes widened in surprise as he glanced at his clock. Sighing, he turned his attention back to the intercom. “Yes, thank you. I'm ready for him.” He stood up as his office door opened to admit Dekim Barton, who wore his usual immaculate suit and carried an expensive-looking fedora in his left hand.

 

Dekim extended his right hand for J to shake. “Nice to see you again, old chap,” he said jovially. His cultured accent came from years at Eton, but his shrewd, haggard face could never lend the illusion of warmth, no matter what came out of his mouth. J adjusted his dark glasses on his nose and gestured Dekim to a seat in front of his desk so that they could get this over with.

 

Sitting in his chair and steepling his fingers in front of him, J frowned at his visitor. “Now, what have you come here to tell me that is so important, Dekim?”

 

Dekim settled his hat in his lap as he spoke. “I had a meeting with the Board last week, and we reviewed the progress of the school. We've collected fifteen years' worth of data now, and it's been decided that we now have more than enough information to proceed with the next stage of the plan.”

 

J's eyes widened.

 

“So,” Dekim continued, apparently not noticing the other man's expression, “changes will commence this year, and the 2007 graduates will be the first products of Project Meteor on the market.” As if that was the end of the matter.

 

J stood up, ignoring that his chair fell over behind him as he glared at Dekim, enraged. “You know my feelings about this, Dekim! I was against it from the start and I still am!”

 

“Yes, I know that's the case,” Dekim said quietly, absently stroking a finger along the brim of his hat as he spoke. “However, I think you will easily recall how you still owe us your life and livelihood—you and your four compatriots. Therefore—and please correct me if I'm wrong, J—I own you, and what I say, goes.”

 

Clearly enraged, J opened his mouth to speak, but apparently thought better of it and closed it again. After glaring powerlessly for a moment, caught under Dekim's calm, dominating stare, he regained control of himself and crossed his arms in front of his chest, his face devoid of emotion. “Listen carefully, Dekim, because I am only going to say this once. Your company, and your project, and all that you stand for are absolutely reprehensible and as long as I am at the helm of this school, you will not sell my students as cannon fodder in your silly wars. I would sooner close down the school and burn it to the ground.”

 

Dekim looked bemused. “Well, I'd be happy to replace you if that's how you feel about it, J. After all, it's not actually your school, now is it?”

 

Like all people, J had a line, and on the other side of it, he got scary. Dekim had just discovered where that line was. When something snapped inside the man in charge of over two hundred teenagers at WFI, he didn't show it, except for his eyes. It was unfortunate for Dekim that J wore such dark glasses.

 

“Against my wishes and better judgement, Dekim, I went along with your harebrained cash-cow plot fifteen years ago, and it cost me the better part of my dignity—what I had remaining to me at that point—to convince my four colleagues to join us in it. For fifteen years, the five of us buried our collective sense of decency and morals and did as you asked. I acquiesced to you just this summer on your worst idea up until now: that shock of brilliance--” the sarcasm dripped from his voice, “--that the best way to eliminate all those rampant cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in the battlefield after making their first kill, was to pit the students against each other, in the presence of their peers, in the hopes that you could both desensitize them and market the survivors as some kind of... of battle-hardened, creme-de-la-creme, successful test subject!” J's voice rose to a roar in his rage; his secretary could probably hear him through his thick office door as he yelled at his employer, pointing wildly at him with a shaking finger. “I stood by and allowed all of this, but I will tell you now, Barton: not anymore! Make one, single, solitary, Goddamned move against this school and you will regret it. You will regret that you ever underestimated what The Five Doctors are truly capable of. We deserve our reputation.” He pointed to the door. “Now get out of my office!”

 

Cool as a cucumber, Dekim Barton took the cue, rising gracefully from his chair and walking to the door, while placing his hat on his head. With a hand on the knob, he turned back to face J again, sizing him up with a sneer of contempt as the Doctor stood still, breathing heavily. “This will not be the last time we meet,” he said simply, leaving the room without another word.

 

As soon as the door was firmly shut, J collapsed against the edge of his desk, shaking all over.

 

***

 

On the second floor, directly above the Headmaster's office, there was a girls' washroom. During the middle of a class hour, it was nearly always empty. This moment was one of the exceptions.

 

Relena and Hilde had been standing in the middle of the tiled expanse, glaring each other down intensely, when they suddenly realized around the same instant that they could hear voices. Male ones.

 

Relena broke the staring contest first, casting around for the source of the sound. Boys being in the girls' washroom was a serious offense, and at that moment, she would have really liked to beat up someone who she knew wouldn't be able to track her down later to retaliate. Hilde scowled at her shadow's sudden inattention, but curiosity quickly consumed her too, and they searched around in a rare display of teamwork for the source of the voices.

 

The two girls proceeded to spend the next ten minutes in the corner near the sinks, crouching over a vent and listening to a conversation (more like an argument, really) playing out in the room below. They could positively identify the voice of their headmaster, but the other man was a stranger. A stranger named Dekim Barton, apparently. When the conversation finally ended with the slamming of a door, they could find no other suitable reaction but to rock back on their heels in the quiet bathroom and gape at each other in shock.

 

***

 

It was a testament to how small the school was that when people noticed Hilde Schbeiker and Relena Darlian walking through the corridors side-by-side, and not only that, but talking to each other in hushed voices, they stopped and stared. Not everyone noticed or cared, of course, but most of the juniors and seniors did. This included Duo Maxwell, who was heading from Applied Science to the afternoon section of Weapons Training class. As his and Hilde's eyes met across the hall, he raised his eyebrows in surprise and mouthed, 'What the fuck?'

 

Hilde's eyes widened suddenly, which gave Duo the alarming feeling that she'd just thought of something. He stopped in his tracks and hardly noticed a freshman running straight into him as he focussed on the two girls. Hilde mumbled something to Relena, and Relena's lips formed the word, 'No', though Hilde rushed toward Duo anyway, her hapless shadow trailing behind her with a look of supreme annoyance on her face.

 

“Duo. Important news. Come. Now.” Hilde grabbed his arm and dragged him from the hallway into a conveniently emptying classroom.

 

“Goddammit, Hilde, can't this wait?” he snarled, as people pushed past them to leave. “I have a fucking class. With Merquise. I don't want to be late or I'll have to be his dueling partner.” He had a private theory that Heero had learned how to hit so hard from Merquise himself.

 

“Oh, you'll live, you bloody whiner. Merquise isn't all he's cracked up to be, anyway. This can't wait,” Hilde hissed.

 

Duo leaned around her to see the still-silent Relena, who had her arms crossed over her chest and appeared to be doing a slow burn. “Um, hello?” he said. “Darlian, right?”

 

“...Yeah,” she said finally, as if it was being tortured out of her. Her tongue suddenly untied, she glared daggers at Hilde. “Do we have to tell your friend? I really would rather this didn't spread all over the school and get us expelled,” she groused.

 

Duo bristled. “Are you calling me a gossip?”

 

Relena turned her scathing look on him, which surprisingly made him want to whimper a little. She answered him slowly and sweetly, as if she was talking to a stupid child; her words were acid in comparison to her tone. “Noooo, but if we tell you, then we'll have to tell some other random kid, and another, and then it'll be some huge rumour, and then the whole school will know. And of course, somehow, it will find its merry way back to us. I don't know about Schbeiker here, but I would rather not be expelled halfway through my senior year. Okay?” She smiled painfully at Duo.

 

Duo gave her a nonplussed look and flipped her off, but Hilde drew his attention back to herself before the now-angry Relena could take a chunk out of his face. “Fuck, Duo, can you go five minutes without pissing somebody off? This is important,” she scolded.

 

The boy glanced at their surroundings; no one else but the three of them was left in the classroom. “Fine, make it quick,” he said in a dull voice.

 

“Okay,” she said quickly, launching into her story. “Darlian and I were getting ready to throw down in one of the second-floor girls' bathrooms, when we heard people talking.”

 

“It was men's voices, so it drew our attention,” Relena explained, stepping forward to stand beside Hilde as she suddenly started taking part in the conversation.

 

“Yeah,” Hilde agreed, shooting a brief glance at her Tag partner. “So we're looking around the bathroom, trying to figure out where these voices are coming from, and it turns out it's from the vent in the floor.”

 

Duo was already bored; his arms were crossed and the fingers of his left hand were drumming out a complicated beat on his right bicep. Relena caught his gaze and explained the interesting part. “This particular washroom is actually almost directly above the headmaster's office,” she said, giving him a meaningful look. Duo raised his eyebrows in interest, and then something dawned on his face.

 

“You mean, you—” he started, pointing in turn at each of them.

 

Hilde rushed on with the story. “It was the headmaster himself, talking to some random guy—what was his name?”

 

“Dekim,” Relena prompted.

 

“Yeah, Dekim. Dekim Barton. Anyway, they weren't having a very happy discussion; they were yelling at each other. I think that's why we could hear them.”

 

Relena jumped in again, getting to the point. “I think the headmaster was doing most of the yelling. Barton was threatening the school and the headmaster—well, mostly the headmaster—saying that he could 'remove him' if he didn't 'follow the plan'. The headmaster got really ticked off right about then.”

 

Duo raised an eyebrow. “'Plan'? What 'plan' is this?”

 

The girls looked at each other. “We didn't hear a lot about that,” Hilde said hesitantly. “Something about your graduating year....”

 

“...And cannon fodder,” Relena finished.

 

Hilde turned to stare at her. “I don't remember that!”

 

Relena snorted disdainfully. “Not my fault you weren't paying attention. You were probably still looking over by the stalls when the noise was clearly coming from the vent. Stupid idiot.”

 

Hilde's right hand bunched into a fist. “You fucking...”

 

Duo's eyes went wide, and he slipped in between them before the fight they'd postponed earlier broke out again. “Okay, ladies, chill out. This is neither the time nor the place. Darlian, did you hear anything else?”

 

With effort, Relena stopped glaring at Hilde and looked at Duo, her blue eyes going suspiciously sunny again at a speed that disconcerted Duo. “Well... oh!” She snapped her fingers as she remembered, her eyes lighting up even more. “The headmaster mentioned Tag!”

 

Hilde, her anger forgotten in her sudden excitement, pointed at Relena as the memory dawned on her as well. “That's right! It was about the rule change this year! He was blaming Barton for that, saying he hadn't wanted to go along with it, and what else did he say... it was way out of left field....”

 

Relena's forehead bunched as she thought about it. “He said something about... post-traumatic stress disorder... and battlefields. I also remember him saying 'test subject' and something about economics. Marketing schemes and that. It was really strange.”

 

Duo leaned back against the wall of the classroom, his arms folded across his chest once again as he regarded them both with one eyebrow raised. “Was this the sum total of what you claim to have heard?” he asked.

 

Hilde caught his drift immediately. “'Claim to'? Maxwell, are you calling me a liar?” she snarled.

 

He didn't rise to the bait. “All I'm saying, Hilde, is that you're telling a wild story with a lot of holes in it. How am I supposed to get worked up about this when not only I don't know what the hell is going on, but neither do you?” He half-turned to leave, shouldering his bag. “You get bonus credibility points for cooperating with your shadow on this fairy tale, but I'm still disinclined to believe you. Like Darlian said, rumours....” He gestured vaguely.

 

Hilde grabbed her friend's shoulder and slammed him against the wall so that he couldn't escape. “Fuck you, Duo, we're telling the goddamn truth.”

 

Duo tossed his head lightly, shaking his bangs out of his eyes as he regarded her coolly. “So find something a little more substantial than hearsay you can only barely remember, and maybe I'll listen harder next time. Now if you ladies will excuse me, I have class.” He left the room without another word, shaking his head and muttering.

 

Hilde, incensed by his attitude, charged out of the classroom after him. “I hope Merquise works your sorry, braided ass into the ground, you dick!” she called, giving his retreating back the finger. He ignored her as he turned the corner at the end of the hall.

 

Hilde reentered the room to pick up her book bag from the floor. She looked up to see Relena giving her a haughty look. “What the hell do you want?” she spat.

 

Relena just shook her head, said, “I told you so,” and left.

 

Hilde slammed her hand against the closest desk, feeling it smart through her palm. “I'm gonna kill her.”

 

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A/N: Yeah, I haven't updated this one for a while. I had a chapter of DB to finish and post first, and besides that, I claim RL taking precedence over my hobbies online. New chapter of this one when it comes to me; in the meantime look for more updates on DB if you read it. Later days.