Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Parallel ❯ The Universe Answered ( Chapter 3 )

Before Heero could pull the trigger there was a change in pressure like a door in a spaceship suddenly swinging wide, only the change seemed to take place in the center of his being--a dropping sensation almost akin to the loosening of spirit that hit him the first time he ever made love to Relena. His vision darkened and he wondered for a moment if he had already fired the gun in his mouth and that this was at last the true feeling of death. But his senses registered the tang of cold metal on his tongue and air flowing into his lungs, just as his ears were deafened by a low frequency boom that explained the sickening crawl in his gut.

With no time for solid thoughts, Heero reacted as he'd been trained and even though ready to end his life, he removed the gun reflexively from his mouth and trained it instead on the growing sphere of darkness forming in the middle of his room.

Indeed it seemed both a sphere and yet as two-dimensionally flat as a sheet of paper. It had started as a dot of darkness in the periphery of vision. But quickly it grew large enough to fit a grown man.

Heero was morbidly entranced as indeed the outline of a human fell face-first onto his floor, or at least the top half of one. The bottom half seeming to merge with the inky hole from which it had suddenly emerged. With weapon now aimed at the head of the form, he stood, legs akimbo, ready to embrace this strange new threat, mind only beginning to remember his wish for death.

The person on the floor, if indeed it was a person--it was difficult to be certain since it seemed to be made of the same non-existent space as the hole to which it was attached--began to move, clutching it's head in frantic moves that implied the panic of suffocation. Suddenly the frenzied motions stopped, the hands made a decisive motion of disengaging from the head and then calmly came together in what looked like prayer, fingers to the chin.

Like a dark flower opening to the black light of some unknown celestial body, the inky form of the face oozed up and back to reveal the impossible head of a man, one that Heero had known for nearly ten years before his death from a sniper shot to the head.

With his gun still pointed at that impossibly familiar head that now seemed to float at the end of a human shaped stalk of darkness, Heero watched as the mouth gasped in air and the eyes, previously squeezed shut fluttered open and rolled in a seeming caricature of relief. After a small chuckle, the head turned and violet-blue eyes locked onto his own with a look of intensity that Heero hadn't seen since the days of war.

"Heero!"

An absurd grin flared across the American's face as he scanned Heero from head to toe.

"It's really you! You're even pointing a gun at me!"

The amusement, relief, disbelief and crazy joy in Duo's voice was almost enough to trigger an insane laugh from Heero. After all, the last 90 seconds had been less than sane. Then a thought occurred to Heero, one he voiced aloud.

"Maybe I am dead, and my mind is misfiring in my death throws."

Duo's face contorted in what almost passed for rage as he exclaimed, "You damned well better not be dead, Heero. I didn't go through all this just to find your corpse." The young man's strangely severed looking head surveyed Heero from head to toe, carefully, as though checking for errors. Raising his eyebrows, as though amazed to find him in one piece, Duo muttered, "Besides you look pretty lively to me."

In Heero's mind a number of questions arose, such as … Who are you, and why are you here. What is the anomaly you came through, and why did you choose to look like Duo Maxwell.

Instead of voicing these questions, he said, "I'm going to kill you."

"Yeah, yeah. I know, just let me talk to you for one minute and then if you still want to you can fire away, okay?"

After what seemed a very long time, Heero, stifling all urges for action, decided to cultivate patience.

"You have sixty seconds."

One of Duo's eyebrows rose in silent rebuke. "Jeez, you're definitely Heero all right," he muttered as he lifted his torso up and rested on his elbows. The process seemed to be an uncomfortable one. Looking up at Heero again, he took a deep breath and said with no preamble, "I'm from a parallel universe. Quatre found the beginnings of a design in Dr. S's computer and has been working with Howard and Trowa to complete it for the past two years." Duo paused to gauge Heero's reaction to this, but found no clues as to what went on behind the poker mask of constant hostility. He went on. "He had deleted the Wing Zero design years ago when we detonated the gundams, but he had hoped to piece them together anyway. This is what he found. According to Quatre, this `navigator' as he calls it is supposed to send me, by default, to a universe that is similar enough to ours that I could actually find you but where I can't run into myself, and where my interacting with you wouldn't harm your space-time continuum. In other words, our universes are close to identical, only in yours I'm dead and you are probably about to die."

Heero looked at the ornate gun in his hand that was now aimed at the head of a man who had always claimed to be his friend, who had been dead for nearly a year. He remembered his desire for his own death just moments before, remembered just how much pressure he'd been applying to the trigger when the black hole had opened into his room, realized that this was not the Duo he had known, and that he had indeed been about to die.

He lowered the gun and asked, "Why are you here?"

Duo grinned in relief and said the only words that really could have made a difference.

"Our world needs you. … Relena needs you."

If Duo hadn't been staring right at him, unblinking at that moment he would have missed the sudden tension that seemed to contract all the muscles along the right side of Heero's face. It was enough to let Duo know he had a chance of success.

"She's dead here, isn't she."

Heero had regained his composure enough to not react to the statement of Relena's death said so openly, carelessly. If anything, he just glared a little harder, wondering if he should end this all right now.

"In our universe it's you who's dead. The Blue Earth Party has slowly enacted legislation to break down all the equity and independence Relena hammered out for the colonies. They've created a standing `space army' equipped with mobile dolls, and have declared six of the colonies to be harboring terrorist elements. The truth is, Relena could have settled it all before it came to this, but they made her President of the ESUN and then erected a `security' barricade around her since the assassination attempt that killed you and your seven months old daughter. She's essentially under house arrest and when we finally got through to her, she …" Duo averted his eyes before continuing, "she didn't want to leave."

Duo was not looking anymore, lost in some personal disappointment. It took him a moment to decipher the whispered question that had strangled its way out.

"Um, yeah. Do you have a daughter here?"

Heero didn't reply. He was doing the math. Seven months old … if the timelines were truly parallel … seven plus nine equals sixteen. Sixteen months. She had been dead two years. No, he had never had a daughter. Unless …

"How long has your version of me been dead?"

Duo looked as though he'd like to scratch his head, but obviously it wasn't worth the effort in his current, odd physical circumstances.

"Let's see. Uhhhh, I'd say about eight months."

Heero's math skills were fast enough. Who could know that the knowledge of a lost child, one that hadn't even had time to form inside her womb would so alter his patterns of denial. He sank down to the floor, just inches from Duo's prone form, and for the first time since her death gave in completely to grief, as the loss of a child they'd never even known they would have, made her absence complete. He raised the gun to his left temple, having become unaware of anything around him, even the gaping impossibility of a space-time anomaly and a man returned from the dead right in front of him. He said a silent good-bye, this time with no secret wish for her to return and pulled the trigger.

Luckily or unluckily, fatefully or randomly, whatever the view you might take on such a thing, Duo's reflexes were fast and his instincts tuned to the preservation of others over his self. And so, with great stupidity and serendipity, and a good deal of discomfort he shot out his left arm, instinctively saving his right from damage and shoved his hand into the space between Heero's pallid temple and the muzzle of the firing gun.

The portal through which Duo had come was in fact a membrane of space that was being stretched and warped to thoroughly encompass him from head to all but one foot. Said foot was anchored by none other than Trowa's hands and a liquid helium chain kept stable through a mesh of nano-compressors that kept Duo from slipping completely out of his originating station in space and time. His head was free of the membrane in Heero's universe by the use of a similar ring of the noble gas and its helping nano-machines. The body that lay between these points balanced precariously between existence and an obliteration that would have wiped him from every timeline in the universe from his birth to his various deaths. He was perilously close to a massive annihilation of his presence in all of space-time and thus a rupture of the continuum itself.

But a membrane of space is in fact impervious to something as weak as a piece of metal flung at a mere 200 meters per second. The bullet from Heero's gun ricocheted off of Duo's palm and embedded itself halfway into a wall stud on the other side of the room. Death was cheated, life was saved and more importantly, the future changed.

Duo was livid.

"I told you," he snarled as he pried the gun from Heero's unresisting fingers, "I didn't go through all of this just to find you dead!"