The Hand of Sorrow: Family Reunion, Part One

I do not own Gundam Wing or the characters from it. If I did, the Remastered version of the series would have also been uncut. I am just borrowing them. The Family Reunification Act is not my concept, either. I am just running with it.

Thanks to the Family Reunification Act, four of the Gundam pilots find out about family they did not know they had. In this part, Trowa Barton meets his sister.

This starts two days after Relena's disastrous 17th birthday (see Episode Zero: Preventer 5 for details).

Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Used without permission and not for profit.

Preventer HQ in Washington, DC, April 10th, After Colony 197

"No, no, HELL no!" Duo Maxwell exclaimed, shying away from a very large syringe. "There is no way in Hell I'm giving more blood this month! They got a pint outta me during last week's drive!"

"Stop being such a big baby, Duo," Zhang Wu Fei grumbled mock annoyance, crossing his arms. "Giving a DNA sample is a mandatory part of the Preventer recruitment process, meaning if I had to do it, pal, then so do you."

"Besides, who said anything about me taking your blood?" Dr. Sally Po snapped back, her light gray eyes flashing with ill-concealed humor. "All I said was if you boys want to be Preventers, you have to submit a DNA sample. It's for identification purposes in case something happens, I never said anything about taking blood, and quit eyeballing the cardiac syringe, Duo. It's for the OR."

"Whoa, you're gonna stick that thing in someone's heart?!"

"Only if I need to. It's used for injecting drugs directly into the heart, or you can use one of these suckers for a turkey baster. Your choice."

Duo made a face at the casual reply, and Sally and Wu Fei both chuckled at it. All these young men hated hospitals, drugs and hypodermic needles with a passion. They usually avoided them like the plague unless they were dying, but the Maxwell Church's little demon loathed them. In Duo's opinion, the only good things to ever come out of hospitals were babies.

"So how are we gonna do this if you don't need our blood?" Hiiro Yui asked gruffly. He hated the idea of submitting his DNA to anyone for any reason, but if he wanted a position with Preventer, he had to do it. Besides, with one of Relena's pet projects, the Family Reunification Act, so close to passing, he figured he might as well get it done before it became mandatory.

"Cheek swabs, two of them from each of you, and yes, Quatre, that means you, too," Sally replied, handing two long cotton swabs with plastic caps on them to the youngest Gundam pilot, then handed out swabs to the other three recruits.

"Why two?" Quatre asked, genuinely curious.

"Probably in case the lab screws things up and loses one," his best friend, Trowa Barton, answered for the doctor with a smirk. That got a chuckle out of the tow-headed Sandrock pilot.

"Are you saying that our lab techs are incompetent?" Sally asked, arching her brow.

"Not at all," Hiiro interjected with a snicker, "just clumsy."

"Shut up and start swabbing, you," Sally retorted, then collected the swabs from each of the four recruits. After that, the five teens files out of the lab to go out and have lunch.

It had been a long, crazy month.

It was four weeks to the day that the Gundam pilots submitted their DNA; three weeks since the Earth Sphere United Nation's President, George Ellis, signed Relena's bill, the Family Reunification Act, into law; two weeks since his opponent, Alexandre Philippe Lafayette, tried to have it declared unconstitutional, and a week since the Supreme Court deemed that it was, indeed, a law that didn't violate the terms of the ESUN Constitution.

Sally Po sat at her computer, waiting for test results. Unbelievably, all five Gundam pilots allowed their DNA to be entered into the Family Reunification Office's database in the hope that someone out there knew who three of them were. Within minutes, a pinging noise alerted her that the tests were finished running.

"Well, I'll be damned," the pretty Chinese doctor said to a lab tech with a grin as she checked the readout on the monitor. "I'll be double damned. I expected results for some of the others, but not for him. I'd better print these results and get them to Director Une, but first I need to make a phone call."

Sally hit the print tab on the screen, and while she waited for the test results to finish printing, she made a vidphone call.

Catherine Bloom had just returned to her trailer from an afternoon of grocery shopping to find a message on her videophone's answering system. She pressed the play button and the face of a blonde-haired woman with a musical contralto came on the view screen.

"Hi, Miss Bloom, this is Dr. Sally Po at Preventer Headquarters in Washington," Sally's video mail message said. "I've got some very good news for you. We've found your baby brother, Triton, and he's alive and well. We haven't informed him that he has surviving family yet, but when we have, he's going to want to meet you at a suitable place and time. If you could call me back, I'll be glad to schedule a time and place for the two of you to meet ..."

They ... they've found Triton? He's alive, and he wants to meet me? Cathy thought, startled by this wonderful bit of news, then wondered how the young man she thought of as her brother, Trowa Barton, was going to take this news. She also realized that Doctor Po hadn't left her a phone number to call back.

Wait a minute, the pretty, redheaded knife thrower's thoughts continued. I have Trowa's direct number at Preventer. I can call him and ask if he can patch me through to her office.

Cathy's finger tapped three keys, zero, three, and Send to speed dial the young man she thought of as a kid brother. After the second ring, she heard a familiar, quietly masculine voice say "Barton."

"Hey, Trowa."

"Hey, Cathy. What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing's wrong. I just got a call from someone there named Sally Po, but she didn't leave a number so I could call her back. Could you patch me through to her ...?"

"I can do better than that," he interrupted with a faint smile. "I'll give you the number to her direct line. Got a pen and a piece of paper handy?"

"Sure do," Cathy replied, answering his smile with one of her own. She jotted down the number as her ersatz brother read it to her, then repeated it back to him to be sure she got it right. After a few moments of sibling small talk, Cathy thanked Trowa for his help and hung up.

I wonder why Sally called Cathy? Trowa thought as he hung up, and a confused look crossed his narrow, handsome face. Now I remember ... Cathy said she wanted to find out if her real brother was still alive. She must have submitted a DNA sample when the Circus was here last month and Sally finally got a hit on the database. Well, whoever he is, he's a lucky bastard.

"Hey, Tro. Something wrong?" Duo Maxwell asked as he entered the office that they shared with the other three Gundam pilots. He had overheard some of Trowa's call from Cathy, and worried about his friend. With him was their friend, fellow Gundam pilot and fellow Preventer agent Hiiro Yui.

"It's nothing, really," Trowa replied with a shrug. "Cathy got a call from Sally, is all. She didn't say so, but I think the Family Reunification Office might have found her brother."

"You're probably worrying over nothing, Trowa," Hiiro added after a faint humph. "Whether you're her brother or not, she already thinks of you like one. Triton's gonna be a stranger to her."

"I guess you're right," Trowa conceded with a shrug. Oh, how he wished he had Quatre there with him, but his partner was spending his lunch break visiting with his eldest sister Iria and newborn nephew, Farid. The name, which meant unique and rare, suited the baby; he was the spitting image of his mother, both she and her son were healthy, and for one of the women of the Winner family to have a baby naturally and survive the experience was truly a rare and unique thing.

No, this ISN'T the end of it. My laptop died on me and I will be finishing this chapter as soon as I am able to. Fortunately, I have my stories on a flash drive.

There are some surprises in store for our pilots, especially Hiiro, Duo and Quatre, so stay tuned.