Title: 001
Genre: Dark
Characters: Heero Yuy, Dr. J
Rating: T
Heero's reprogramming during the war.
Part One:
Heero waited and watched from the darkness of the nearby park as the fires were extinguished by the fire department. He watched horrified men, women and children huddled together nearby as they watched their homes burn and perish in the flames.
Hours had passed. The people had been taken away. Fences had been erected to keep people away from the rubble until the blast was completely investigated. The ash from the fires that burned wildly a couple of hours before had collected in the climate control systems overhead and was now trickling down to the ground like snow, covering the debris with a thin layer of gray soot.
He hadn't moved. When the emergency crews arrived he should have fled. He could have been caught. It was the right thing to do. He couldn't risk his mission. It was what he was trained to do, but something told him to stay. He had to see her. He had to know if she was okay.
He had seen everyone who had come out of the apartment building alive. There were men, women and children alike. But not her. She wasn't among them.
He wasn't saddened by this. He wasn't disturbed or upset. He didn't feel anything except a slight anxiety. He had to see her. He didn't know why, he just had to.
Once all of the rescue personnel and response crews had gone he climbed the fence and began his search. Calmly he walked through the still steaming rubble searching for her. He had watched them extract a few bodies from the wreckage but none seemed to fit her description. He searched under slabs of cement and dug through flickering piles of ember for any sign of her but there was nothing.
Maybe she wasn't home, he rationalized. However, just as he had decided this something caught his eye.
Her sun hat. Its perky little flower singed at the edges but it was altogether still intact, miraculously, despite the state of the surrounding building. He grabbed the hat and turned it over in his hands a few times before setting it on top of a small pillar of cement and rebar. He searched the surrounding area. Had this been her apartment? Did she have the hat with her when she died? There was no sign of a body. Had she escaped and he hadn't seen? Or maybe rescue crews had taken her and Heero had missed it?
His anxiety began to mount. He took a step back and with it a deep breath. He needed to go. He knew he wasn't supposed to be there. He knew he was wasting time but he couldn't bring himself to leave. Not yet. Not without any answers.
It was then that he saw it. He wasn't sure how he had missed it in the first place and yet there it was. A small singed ball of fur curled up beneath a piece of stone. Its golden coat was unmistakable. It was her puppy, Mary.
He approached it slowly. It wasn't moving. He carefully set a hand on it to feel for a heartbeat. There was nothing. It was stiff and cold.
He stared unblinking at his hand pressed against the dirty puppy's side and felt a peculiar sensation. It was a tightening, first in the back of his throat. The feeling spread down his arms and wound through his shoulders, straining and aching. His chest began to feel heavy. His eyes began to burn, his vision blurred by tears stinging their way through his eyelids.
He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. His heart began to pound relentlessly in his ears.
He grabbed the puppy and gently held it to his chest. He grabbed the burnt flower from the sun hat and began to move through the charred rubble back to the fence.
"Hey! Kid! What are you doing in there," a guard yelled from the opposite side of the fence. The man raised his gun and pointed it at him. Heero stopped and turned to face the man. He tucked the puppy and flower under one arm and glared hatefully at the soldier.
"Get out of there you dumb kid! Nobody is allowed in there!" The soldier bellowed.
Heero's arm lifted. A gun seemed to have materialized in his fist. The man yelled for backup. Heero pulled the trigger.
Part Two:
"Are you sure he can be rehabilitated? Perhaps we should replace him? Some of the other doctors say he is beyond repair," the nearest man in a business suit replied. Dr. J watched him as he set his coffee cup on the table and began sifting through folders and files. After a bit of rummaging he had produced a particularly thick folder and slid is across the table to the doctor, who reluctantly took it.
"This one has shown a lot of potential. And the other professors say he has hardly any emotional response at all. Surely he must make a better candidate than 001."
Dr. J opened the file folder with his good hand and skimmed over the stats, graphs and lines written there. Sure, the numbers looked good, but he knew better. He would never change his mind on this.
"Heero is a good soldier. He has had a setback, yes, but does that really warrant decommissioning him? I see here that the other boy has better a memory but even now I tell you Heero had higher response time, better piloting skills, reasoning skills, and his physique is incomparable. In fact his only drawback is this one event, which I might add, your prototype has never been tested in that situation. Who is to say your pick wouldn't respond in the same manner?"
The man in the suit leaned back in his chair and glanced over at his comrades. All shared the same defiant, disagreeable frown.
"Listen. I know you all have a lot invested in this but I am the doctor here. I know what is best!" Dr. J quipped with a crooked grin. "We can fix him. Why retrain a yearling and be set back nearly 10 months when we can take our experienced horse, retrain him, and have him out of the paddock in less than three weeks? I think my suggestion is much more cost effective, don't you?"
The investors whispered to one another.
"We will have to deliberate, Dr." The man in the suit replied.
"Of course, take your time." Dr. J said sweetly.
He knew he had won.
Part 3:
Heero stood with his back against the wall and watched the other young boys and girls closely. They were all standing shackled to the opposite wall. He recognized a few of them. He had seen them around the base, or while walking down the halls. The second to last one he remembered seeing in the training room. He was on the treadmill across from Heero at the time. He remembered the dark skinned kid from the mess hall. The blond kid he had seen in the training simulator.
He wondered why they were all there. For most of his time here he had been kept away from anyone else, especially people his own age. His only contact with people had been with Dr. J and his specialists. His nutritionist. His personal trainer. His professor. This was the closest he had ever been to any of the other kids on the compound. He knew they were there, he just didn't know anything about them.
He watched as some of the kids took seats against the wall. There were ten of them. They varied in height, weight and age. Heero noticed they all wore the same plain blue sweatpants and t-shirt that he did. They seemed healthy and lean like himself. Something, however, was off about them. They appeared tired. The ones who stood were swaying slightly. The ones who sat on the ground appeared to be falling asleep.
They were all shackled. All but him.
He was startled out of his observation by the hissing of the door to his right. As it opened Dr. J appeared and stumbled inside.
"Ah, Heero. You've met your little friends, have you?"
Heero looked back at the kids. They were staring at him.
"Well, today's lesson is an important one. These young men and women are here to help fix your little problem."
"Problem?" Heero echoed before turning to eye Dr. J closely.
"Yes. You see, Heero, I feel that I have failed you. I have tried to make you perfect in every possible way." The old doctor grabbed the young boy by the shoulder with his metal clawed hand and pulled him closer. "You are fast. You are strong. You are smart. You can pilot anything. You can operate any computer, machine, or mechanism without so much as a thought. You are keen and listen to orders, but there is one flaw that has made it known to us. Something we have to fix in you to achieve perfection."
Heero felt uncomfortable. He tried to step away from the doctor, but the old man held him fast and kept a firm tight grip on his shoulder.
"When you experienced that little girl and the dead puppy something within you snapped. It was something we had yet to fortify. It was something our team had overlooked. You have been trained to kill. You have combat skills. However, you have never touched death. You have killed from the safety of your mobile suit. Your enemies, however, never had a face. And so when you came in contact with that dead animal you had, for the first time, touched death and experienced it first hand without a barrier of metal to seal you from the world. It is my failure, not yours. I don't want you to feel like you have done anything wrong."
Heero knew the old doctor was trying to soothe him but he couldn't ignore the darkness seeping from the old man's words. Dr. J was right. Ever since he had returned from his mission he hadn't felt right. He felt weak. Vulnerable. He felt that everyone who came in contact with him but ashamed of him.
There was no denying he had had a breakdown. It had taken hours for them to pry the dead puppy out of his hands. He had to be sedated for a few days and locked in his room without food as punishment. Through that entire scenario he had thought he had done something wrong. He had believed it- and now here was Dr. J telling him he hadn't done a thing. Heero couldn't believe him. Even if he was ordered to.
"So, this will be your first course of training," Dr. J stated as he unclamped the boy's shoulder. He then motioned to the line of young boys and girls shackled by the ankle to the wall. "You will practice on them. And by the end, you will know what it is like to take a life."
Heero looked up at Dr. J with an unbelieving stare. Dr. J stood back and motioned again to the children against the wall.
"Go on," Dr. J said with a frown. "Do it."
Heero looked over at the kids. Some of them were staring at them in horror. One kid was sobbing. The oldest of the group stood with his arms crossed over his chest glaring at Heero in defiance. One of the girls around Heero's age was trying to pull her foot out of the shackle.
"I… can't."
"Heero. I order you to kill them."
"I have no weapon."
"You and I both know you don't need one."