Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Wayward ❯ Wayward - Chapter Four ( Chapter 4 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Authors Notes: Well, not as many people are reading Wayward as I had hoped



Authors Notes: Well, not as many people are reading Wayward as I had hoped. I'm a little disappointed that no one seems to be reading any of my work that isn't Broken Wing, as if they seem to think that anything that isn't Broken Wing just isn't worth it. Don't worry, though, that's not going to discourage me. I've been waiting and wanting to write Wayward for too long to stop just because some people only read one of my fics. So those of you who ARE reading and enjoying it don't have to sigh and say, "Oh, well, there's just another fic Sailorcelestial isn't going to finish." I WILL finish it! HAHA! Anyways, thankies to Trenchcoat Man, Marika Webster, and Rashaka-chan. And thankies to all of you wonderful, wonderful people who are reading this even though it isn't Broken Wing.

Disclaimer: Aw, you know Gundam Wing don't belong to me.

Wayward - Chapter Four


Hiiro sighed and tipped the bottle over once again, pouring thick brown liquid into a shot glass. Before his blurred vision swirled the DNA test results. For the seventh test. Even after he told Quatre that the test couldn't be wrong after five results, he'd run it twice more. Again the same answer appeared on his laptop screen. Again Hiiro Yui felt like yielding to complete disbelief and running the test just one more time. Just once. But this time he sighed, threw back the shot, and allowed himself to finally, totally accept the truth.
Duo Maxwell was a murderer. A cold-hearted, probably sociopathic, killer who was still out there. Who could tell where he would go next and what he would do. Duo could target any one of the former Gundam pilots next, or any myriad of innocent colonists or Earthsphere citizens. He had to be caught.
Quatre would not be up to the task. He was still weak enough from leftover empathic pain, from staying up all night with Doctor Galer, and from the news of the previous day. Trowa would arrive soon and his entire attention would immediately fall on the delicate Arabian. Wufei was the best choice in asking for help, but assistance from his corner may or may not come. Only one way to find out . . . Deft fingers trailed the line of Wufei's office number, then he waited for the reply.
One ring. Two rings. Three.
After five rings the vidphone screen lit up with the face of a young, mousy brown-haired woman wearing thick black framed glasses. Her eyes didn't even lift from the paperwork scattered over her desk as she spoke.
"Chang Wufei's office, Preventer Chang is currently out, may I take a message?"
"No, I need to speak with Preventer Chang immediately."
The woman finally looked up, steel glinting suddenly behind her matching mousy eyes.
"I'm sorry, sir," she informed him with only the barest hint of politeness, "but Preventer Chang can't be disturbed. I'm going to have to take a message."
"Patch me through to wherever he is, or I'll do it myself."
"Listen you rude little piece of-"
That was the moment Hiiro decided to cut her off, seeing as her mood certainly wasn't a cooperative one. He quickly used his laptop to hack into Preventer Headquarters' system and find the area where Wufei's pass code had last been used. The prison area. Hiiro sighed and hoped he'd be able to talk to Wufei this time. The previous day Wufei hadn't even been at HQ.
"Uh . . . Preventer Prison . . . er, whoever you are, could this wait?" The young Preventer, probably a new recruit, stared back at Hiiro with wide, unsure eyes.
"Just tell Preventer Chang that Hiiro Yui is on the line to speak with him." The unknown face vanished. There was speech in the background; faint, barely audible mumbles, incoherent screeching from what sounded like a feminine voice, and the distinct sound of Wufei's loud voice booming out his anger. Soon enough the Chinese boy's face came into view, his golden skin somewhat flushed from some emotional or physical exertion.
"Yui, I don't have time for this right now, I've got a situation."
"Wufei, you have to listen to me-"
"I'm sorry, but I've got an out of control prisoner and I can't talk right now. Call me later." And the line went dead.
Hiiro sighed, leaned back, and poured himself another shot.


~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~


The little girl shuddered as Duo ran a hand over the gentle curls that blanketed her head. He smiled, unable to hide his joy at seeing her unchecked fear. Children were so much more satisfying than adults when it came to fear. Adults tended to have some silly notion of pride, of keeping their fright hidden as if that would make it go away. Children, however, shook and cried, called for their mommies and daddies because everyone knew that mommy and daddy were the strongest people in the world. But mommy and daddy never came, and then the fear only became stronger. Duo fed on this child's tears.
"Don't worry," he told her, his voice pleasant enough to calm her somewhat. Calm her, and there would be more fear later. Frighten her completely now and she would break down, faint, possibly become catatonic. "Don't worry little one, everything's going to be just fine."
"I-I want my mommy." It was a whisper, a small and terrified sound, but stated so simply and so trustingly. Duo smiled again and closed his eyes, trailing his hand over her soft, brown curls. She had the innocence of childhood, still young enough to trust in something higher than herself to protect her. Whether it be her parents, or the God they had told her about if they had chosen to do so, she had not yet grown old enough to begin to doubt. Somewhere inside a deep part of his mind missed the time, if there ever had been one for him, where things had been so simple.
"Didn't you know?" he asked her suddenly, "Your mommy's in Heaven." His eyes opened to gaze into her small face, to gauge her reaction, to feed on her fear if it arose.
"I know. Daddy told me. He told me she turned into a beautiful angel and she watches over me." Her little frame shrank away from his grown one. "She's gonna come get me soon and take me home." Her face scrunched into a pitiful expression, tears climbing over the wrinkled hills and valleys of her pained look. But still there rested a kind of defiance. A true and untainted belief that she would be saved. It bordered on adult pride.
"She isn't an angel," he growled, angry with the child for the faith she had that he had never truly known, "She's dead. That means she isn't alive, she's buried in the ground and she's gone forever!" Violence streaming from his pores, Duo grabbed the back collar of her pastel blue dress and dragged her to her feet. "And you know what? She's not going to come and take you home! And if you keep talking about her, if you keep being a bad girl, then I'll lock you up and never let you leave!" Without even pausing to drink in her tears, to appreciate her trembles, Duo snatched her through the doorway and into the room he'd fixed to house his precious little treasure. He tossed her tiny body inside, shut and locked the door. He took a deep breath, calmed himself enough to suppress his own shudders of rage. At last he pressed his hands to the wooden door and sighed. "You stay there, little one. I'm going out now. Maybe I'll bring Auntie Dorothy home. Would you like that?" Silence from within. "Well?" His tone grew more demanding and there was a small squeak from the other side.
"Yes, Uncle Duo."
"Good. You learn quickly, little one. I'll be back soon."


~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~


Wufei sighed and pressed his hand into his forehead. The weight of his fatigue let him believe that if he just pressed hard enough, his headache would go away and his prisoner would start being cooperative. But the pain persisted, and all he heard from the suspects corner was a faint whimpering. And so, the brave little Preventer sighed once more, and leapt back into battle like a dutiful soldier.
"Tell me, if you would Dorothy, why you stole the Aurora drug?"
"Because He told me to." Somehow the inflection in her voice led him to believe this person's title, like God's was meant to be capitalized.
"And who is 'He'?"
"I can't!" she screamed and lowered her head into her lap, placing pale hand over reluctant ears. "He'll kill me if I tell you!" The once proud form of Dorothy Catalonia sat reduced to a tightly curled ball in a prison cell. Wufei had never met her personally before this day, but somehow he'd always thought of her as strong and someone to be reckoned with, even as a woman. This was far from what he had imagined.
"But Dorothy," he tried again, clenching his teeth in his best effort to remain calm and genial, "I have to know his name if I'm going to arrest him. You obviously know he's a bad person. I would think you'd want him in jail."
"He'll kill me! You can't know how much pain He'll put me through if I tell you His name!" Pure, unadulterated panic flooded her dark eyes, and the Chinese boy saw so many things in those pools that he couldn't begin to name them all. "He'll kill me," the girl repeated for probably the thousandth time in the past hour.
"If you don't open up and start talking, I just might kill you," Wufei spat, despite the sick feeling left in his stomach by her words. What could she mean? It almost sounded as if she were not speaking of a mortal man at all, but some vengeful deity.
"At least you would shoot me, or strangle me, or maybe even burn me." Suddenly her dark orbs stared straight into his and the Preventer knew beyond any doubt that this woman was perfectly sane and perfectly terrified. "All of those deaths are painless compared to what he would do to me!" Dorothy glared at him angrily for a moment longer before sitting back and slipping once more into a frightened stupor.
Wufei felt as if his only expression of the day was an exasperated sigh. This entire investigation has him so frazzled even his neat ponytail fell out of place, creating an annoyance as he had to constantly brush hair back from his eyes.
"Dorothy, if you tell me 'His' name, then I can get some time shaved off your sentence. You can say he coerced into stealing Aurora. But if you continue to be difficult, you will go to trial for theft, treason, and who knows what else Preventer Une can come up with." Wufei paused to be certain she understood this and his reward was a widening of her already panicked eyes. "You face all of these charges yourself, and the full power of the sentence while this mysterious 'Him' gets to walk free. That's not right, Dorothy. You know that. It's not honorable and it's not justice."
The woman stared at him, and deep in her mind he could sense the gears grinding, the wheels turning, and for a good few moments the Chinese boy became convinced that he'd at last won her full confession.
"No. I can't."
He finally named one of those emotions.
"You're in love with him, aren't you?"
Dorothy refused to look at him.


~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~


"I tried telling Wufei," Hiiro assured the newly-arrived Trowa, "but he cut me off. Said he had an out of control prisoner."
"You should have kept calling until he would listen to you." Trowa's slightly narrowed eyes were the only true indication of his concern over the situation.
"You know as well as I do how Wufei gets when he's interrogating a prisoner." Hiiro hesitated to stifle his anger, the flaring of emotions that became harder and harder to control with each day he spent in Sanch. "He could be in that cell for days without food, water, or sleep until he the person's confession."
Trowa nodded, his allotted allowance of words for the day seemingly spent. The two sat in silence the rest of the trip, passengers in the back of the pink limousine that Relena once enjoyed so much. Pagan drove up front, as silent as his two riders. Hiiro wondered if the old butler/spy felt the same loss of purpose as himself. After all, with the beloved princess dead, Pagan would no longer be truly needed as Milliardo tended to drive himself and employed his own spies. Where would Pagan go and what would he do? A question to which Hiiro wished he knew his own answer.
It's almost as if I want another war, he thought, at the same instant knowing it to be the furthest thing from the truth. He would rather wander, a soldier without a battle, than find himself a useful tool again. Some things the human race needed, but a teenage weapon of total destruction was not one of them. The Perfect Soldier was obsolete, and glad of it.
At long last, the silence having become stifling, the large car turned into the more than wide enough driveway of the Sanch Palace. Quatre stood at the top of the massive entry staircase, Rassid and several servants at his side. Hiiro knew for a fact that, after the all-night autopsy, nightmare, and discovery of the true killer, Quatre was too weak to be out of bed. For that reason Rassid had ordered him left at the palace and sent Hiiro to greet Trowa at the shuttleport. Of course, however, the little blonde would not be trapped in bed while his koi arrived. Small he was, and frail at times, yes. But the person who thought Quatre Raberba Winner lacked backbone was a fool indeed. Hiiro had long rid himself of that particular misconception.
"Quatre," Hiiro grunted as he stepped from the car, careful to give a patented 'Hiiro Yui Death Glare,' meant to express in no uncertain terms his disapproval. Quatre waved this off in a haughty gesture he saved for those times he felt himself smothered in caring overprotection. The pale Arabian had yet to fall over dead from exertion, so Hiiro felt inclined to let this incident pass. Trowa, however, gave his koi a dark look, and a certainty hung between then that there would be a 'discussion' later.
"We need to decide what to do about Duo," Hiiro blurted, for lack of anything more subtle to say. The two lovers stand at him in momentary shock, but seemed to recover quickly. It appeared that they expected Hiiro to lack tact.
"I suggest, then, that we move inside." Quatre spoke with tale-tell Winner diplomacy and gestured them towards the door as if it were his L-4 mansion, not a dead princess' palace on Earth. A brief surge of fury barreled up from somewhere deep in Hiiro's gut. This was Relena's home, not Quatre's, and the blonde had no right to act as if it were. "Are you alright, Hiiro?" The stoic boy, nearly bubbling with rage, darted a glance at Quatre.
"Fine," he grunted, and no one paid any attention, for a grunt from Hiiro Yui was normal behavior, not an indication of anger. The four of them, including Pagan, piled inside the mansion to discuss their wayward friend and what to do about him.


~~**~~**~~**~~**~~**~~


Wufei took a break because something told him that this prisoner was going to be tougher to crack than the others. He was halfway to the mess hall when an alarm sounded: one long horn blare followed by two short ones and one more long. It was a specific sequence designed to alert Preventers that a prisoner was in the process of escaping.
"Damn!" Instantly the Chinese boy backtracked, running along his previous plodding footsteps. The alarm continued to peal above him the song of his impending loss of employment should he allow his prisoner to escape. As he neared the prison area he heard two voices. Dorothy Catalonia, screaming incoherently, and another, sickeningly familiar voice.
"This alarm is annoying, don't you agree, Dorothy?" A whimper from the woman. "I thought you would."
Abruptly, the alarms ceased.
Wufei's mind cried against the sudden absence of the blare, for the guard manning the alarm would not shut it off until the crisis was completely under control. He could think of no other reason for it to simply cease unless the alarms had simply broken, which was an impossibility considering the man hours spent maintaining them. He barged into the cell in the next moment, and came across an unlikely sight.
Duo stood in the center of the small space, dressed in a nice and expensive looking navy suit pinstriped with thin white lines. His dress shirt matched the color of his suit, and his tie was white set against that night-like background. White shoes and a large navy fedora completed the ensemble, and Wufei couldn't help but think that the boy looked like something out of ancient gangster movies. At Duo's feet sat a weeping Dorothy, hugging his legs desperately. She murmured under her breath, and though he couldn't hear the words, the Chinese boy knew somehow that she was praying. But not to God. She was praying to the boy whose legs she clasped. Duo reached down slowly, patted her on the head like a father soothing an upset child, and then looked up at Wufei.
"Wufei, good to see you." The sentence was far too insufficient, far too reticent for the lips of Duo Maxwell. And his eyes . . . beneath the laughing indigo of those orbs rested a deep crimson malevolence Wufei had not thought the braided one capable of possessing. "I knew you would be the first here if I allowed the alarms to go off for a certain length of time." This Duo Maxwell definitely held differences from the one Wufei knew; this one was dangerous to everyone, not just the enemy. "But now it's time for Dorothy and me to be leaving. If you'll excuse us." He lifted the woman to her feet using one hand and in a deceptively gentle manner began to lead her forward. Against what he knew to be better judgement, Wufei stepped forward to completely block the cell door.
"Duo, you know I can't-"
"Ah, Wufei, this is why I chose you to be my witness." The impish grin so customary on Duo's boyish face spread into a menacing expression unlike anything on any criminal Wufei had ever seen. Behind him he heard the clamor of other Preventers closing in, but in his gut he knew that all of the Preventers in HQ would not be enough to stop this abomination. "The others might hold back, might try to analyze me before moving in. You, on the other hand, will jump right in with no head at all on your shoulders and sacrifice your blood and life all in the name of justice." Wind . . . where was the wind coming from? It swirled around the two figures, surging their hair upwards in an eddy of wild air. "But I'll spare you that humiliation today, Wufei, and trade it for another one. The pain of losing a prisoner, and not being able to do a damned thing about it."
A dead weight hit Wufei in the chest, a weight that had no source save for the strange wind that Duo seemed to control. The Chinese boy flew backwards, limp in the grip of the wind as a rag doll. He hit bodies behind him and knocked over the first line of approaching soldiers, creating a wall of writhing limbs and people to block the Preventers further down. Pushing against faces, arms, stomachs, and legs, Wufei finally managed to extricate himself from the pile and stumbled back to the cell.
Duo and Dorothy were gone.


End Chapter Four.